Funding for Virginia’s fire service is insufficient, studies show. There are ideas for how to change that.

There’s a financial crisis happening in many volunteer firehouses across the state: The costs of fire engines and other equipment have skyrocketed and the number of emergency calls has increased, while state funding has remained largely flat and funding from localities often can’t stretch to fill the gap.  

So far, the greatest success in fixing that problem has been studying it, said Jeremy Bennett, director of intergovernmental affairs at the Virginia Association of Counties. Two state-ordered studies, conducted in 2023 and 2024, revealed how the fire service funding model works, where it falls short, and how it can be improved. 

But research is only as good as its reach, he said, and many residents who drive past their local firehouse have little to no understanding of the budgeting conversations happening inside. 

In April, Cardinal News surveyed its readers to see what questions they had about their local volunteer fire departments. Queries about funding were a common theme.

Here are eight of those FAQs, answered with data from the studies and insights from fire service stakeholders, in a guide to the challenges and potential solutions for emergency response funding in Virginia. 

How are fire departments funded in Virginia?

About 97% of funding for fire and EMS response in Virginia comes from local governments. About 2% comes from the state, and the remaining 1% comes from federal sources.

Those numbers represent funding across all departments, whether they are run by volunteers, paid firefighters or a combination of the two. About 71% of Virginia’s fire departments are volunteer.  

Localities largely fund their fire departments with revenue from local taxes, the same way they fund other systems ranging from schools to social services.  

The funding that the state administers comes from two main sources. The first is a 1% surcharge on insurance premiums associated with fire, casualty, marine, homeowners and farm owners insurance. That money is collected into the Fire Programs Fund, and distributed to fire departments via several grant programs tailored for eligible expenses. 

The second source of state-administered funding is a vehicle registration fee charged for all motor vehicles. That money flows to an EMS-specific fund for Office of Emergency Medical Services grants. 

The state provides no general fund tax dollars directly to any fire departments, except for occasional one-time funding amendments.

The main source of federal dollars is the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which runs a grant program that provides funding to help departments increase and maintain their number of trained firefighters.

How much are costs rising at fire departments?

Walt Bailey, chief of the Phenix Volunteer Fire Department in Charlotte County, has been answering emergency calls for 53 years and has served as chief for 44 of them. Rising costs have never felt this unsustainable, he said.

“There’s a crisis,” he said. “It’s not emerging. It is here.”

Before the pandemic, a fire engine cost about $400,000 and one set of turnout gear was a couple thousand dollars, he said. Now a fire engine is easily more than $1 million, he said, and turnout gear has a $10,000 price tag.

“If I were to guess what it would take to keep up with inflation, to keep up with replacement of the trucks, the turnout gear, and all, I would say I would need about $400,000 a year,” he said. “Our income here is around $117,000. We can’t keep up with expenses.”

Finding enough volunteers to answer the call is also a challenge, Bailey said. 

There’s declining interest among younger generations to volunteer due to a variety of social and economic factors, he said. Meanwhile, older volunteers are retiring en masse and training requirements are increasing, creating a higher barrier to entry. Plus, Bailey said, adults of any age who might have otherwise volunteered are now picking up second or third jobs for pay instead to keep up with rising expenses in their own households.

“But again, that comes down to funding,” he said of the recruitment challenge. “Say this evening I had five people that show up and want to join the department. I have to provide them with gear. That’s $50,000 total to even get them to start training. … And I don’t have that money.”

Departments that pay all or some of their staff also struggle with recruitment as the pool of available firefighters decreases, Bennett said. They often don’t have the necessary funds to raise wages or introduce other financial incentives for recruits to join and stay in the fire service. 

“Every department in the state, in some way, is asking, ‘What happens to delivery of fire and EMS services if there’s no one available to do it?’” Bennett said. “But inherently, it is more of a challenge in a rural community — it is just the lack of people and funds.”

Why isn’t funding keeping up with rising costs?

No increases have been made to the rate of funding for the state’s Fire Programs Fund since 1995, when it was increased from a 0.8% insurance surcharge to the current 1%. 

While insurance prices have gone up with inflation and thus directed more money to the Fire Programs Fund over the years, increasing costs at fire departments have far outpaced normal inflation, Bailey said. 

Bailey, who also serves on Charlotte County’s board of supervisors, said local government coffers often can’t fill the gap, especially in rural areas with shrinking tax bases. 

“We are in a very rural area that’s economically deprived. Our only choice, in order to come up with funding, is to raise taxes, and then that puts an additional burden on our people. Where are they going to come up with the funding?” he said. 

Bailey’s department used to see success with fundraisers such as chicken fries, he said. But volunteers are now spread so thin that Bailey can’t afford to divert their time to anything other than answering emergency calls. Plus, he said, residents have been less willing to donate recently as they watch the bottom line in their own homes. 

What do the studies say?

The two recent reports concluded that current state funding levels are not sustainable for Virginia’s fire service. 

The first report was conducted by a workgroup of various state agencies and fire service stakeholders, as directed by a 2023 state bill. The second report, funded by the state and released in 2024, was led by outside experts at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Center for Public Policy. 

Both reports cite the drop in volunteer numbers, increasing equipment costs and the surge in emergency call volumes as stresses on an already financially strained system.

“These problems are compounded by insufficient funding, which fails to keep pace with rising expenses and inflation. As a result, response times are getting longer, equipment is deteriorating faster than it can be replaced, and there are growing concerns about the safety of first responders,” according to the 2024 study.   

“There is a need for the state of Virginia to increase its partnership with localities to address the gaps in funding,” according to the study’s conclusion. 

What solutions could Virginia try?

Directing more state funding to fire departments doesn’t have to involve reinventing the wheel, said Spencer Willett, the government affairs manager with the Virginia Department of Fire Programs. Many ideas proposed in the 2023 and 2024 studies, and taken up by legislators in recent years, involve building on models that are already in place.

One solution that fire service stakeholders are focused on, for example, is increasing the insurance rate from 1% to 2% to direct more money to the Fire Programs Fund, Willett said. 

Del. Alex Askew, D-Virginia Beach, proposed legislation earlier this year that would have done so, but the bill did not advance out of the House Appropriations Committee. 

The 2024 report recommends increasing both existing state funding streams — the insurance rate and the vehicle registration fee — and increasing flexibility in the grants that are distributed from them to allow funding to be used for all major fire and EMS needs, including personnel costs. 

Volunteer fire departments are increasingly shifting to combination staffing models, in which a few paid, career staff operate the department every day, supported by a team of volunteers, in order to maintain needed staffing in a time of declining volunteerism. The way state grants are structured now, they’re reserved for specific uses such as training and equipment and can’t be used to pay firefighters. 

Virginia is not unique in that practice: Only one state in the country, New Mexico, provides funding to localities for both fire and EMS personnel. According to the 2024 report, about 60% of Virginia fire departments ranked personnel as their biggest funding need — above gear, facilities, vehicles and other needs. 

Some potential funding solutions adopt ideas from federal programs, Bennett said. For example, legislation proposed by Sen. Tammy Mulchi, R-Mecklenburg County, and Del. Eric Phillips, R-Henry County, this year would have created a state program similar to the FEMA grant program that helps departments increase and maintain their number of trained firefighters. The bills would have also allowed fire departments to use the grant funds to purchase fire and EMS vehicles and acquire necessary gear, but neither bill advanced out of the respective money committee for each chamber.

More legislation has been proposed in the years since the studies offered up funding ideas — and vetted them with examples from other states and measurements of potential impact. 

Even so, securing more state funding has proven to be difficult, Bennett and Willett said. There are many needs in rural Virginia that compete for limited state investment, ranging from the fire service to healthcare systems to workforce development programs and job creation initiatives. And in the U.S., funding fire departments has historically been a local responsibility, and there’s a hesitance among state leaders to take on an additional duty. 

Were there any wins in the General Assembly this year?

A new workgroup was created this year, following the passage of a bill introduced by Sen. Chris Head, R-Botetourt County, to study how money is currently distributed to fire departments in the existing state funding model. 

The current formula is population-based, and has been for decades, Willett said. Fire departments in large urban localities receive more funding than their smaller rural peers, and also answer more calls than them.

“I think everyone agrees in the fire service community that taking from one to give to another is not going to fix the problem,” Willett said. “I expect that report to outline that, unfortunately, changing the formula is not going to address these problems without there being an increase in funding as well.”

Also this year, $2 million was allocated to support localities in providing cancer screenings for career firefighters. Cancer is the leading cause of death in the fire service, Willett said, so seeing it addressed at the state level is “an exciting push forward.”

What can fire departments do to improve their bottom line?

Willett said it will take a shared local and state responsibility to ensure that the fire service is sustainably funded and operated. 

The Virginia Fire Services Board can help localities brainstorm in that effort, Willett said. The group, which includes experts from across the emergency response field, regularly studies localities’ fire departments for free and provides recommendations for improving efficiency and structure. The recommendations made in the studies are non-binding, Willett said, but can help fire departments adopt new strategies that aid long-term sustainability. 

Bennett said some localities are tapping into unique forms of funding to cover emergency response needs, such as Danville, which recently received a $1.6 million fire truck from Caesars Virginia, and Wythe County, which allocates its regional gaming tax revenue from the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Bristol toward its emergency response system. 

What are other states doing?

Virginia is not alone in struggling to fund fire departments adequately. States across the country are seeing increasing emergency calls, reduced volunteerism and new cost burdens at fire departments, according to the 2024 report — “a confluence of factors that have led many states to examine new ways to ensure the provision of fire and EMS services to their citizens.” 

But no two states are the same when it comes to funding the fire service, Willett said. According to the 2023 report, states use a variety of combinations of strategies to collect money for the fire service, such as insurance surcharges, statewide fire taxes, surcharges on traffic citations, and in limited cases, funding derived from the general fund of the state. States distribute that funding in different ways too, ranging from grants to low-interest loan programs for fire or EMS agencies.

Virginia’s fire stakeholders often look to their neighbor, North Carolina, as a “bellwether” for diversifying how it collects funding at the local and state levels and distributes it, Willett said. Its fire funding matrix is much more complex than Virginia’s and thus hard to model, he added, but it provides examples of the solutions that are out there. Unique approaches in North Carolina, Willett said, include a grant program dedicated to helping volunteer departments purchase new tires for their firetrucks, and the wide use of fire tax districts, where designated areas pay an extra property tax rate that directly funds local fire and rescue needs.

“There’s several fire departments that are Virginia fire departments that sit on the North Carolina line, and the only reason they have staffing during the day is because North Carolina is helping,” Willett said.   

Have more questions? Fill out this survey to shape future coverage in Cardinal’s ongoing project that looks at how fire departments in the southwest and southside regions are finding solutions to the challenges they face.