EMERGENCY SERVICES
"We can't afford professional heroes."--Chief Lou Witzeman, Rural/Metro
Fire Department, Inc.
Libertarians contend that the protected status of local
government fire departments leads to increasing expense and "bureaucratization"
in government-provided emergency services. These factors eventually
lead to burdensome and unsatisfactory emergency services. Several
instances of private and "semi-private" fire protection, ambulance, and
rescue companies illustrate, however that many innovations and dramatic
savings are possible--if politics is factored out. The Libertarian
program is to, remove exclusive franchises and tax-funded subsidies, and
to require emergency service organizations to seek revenue from voluntary
customers.
As with every community service, the case
for voluntary, free market fire protection and ambulance services finds
its moral justification in the fact that it is wrong to compel people to
support services they do not want. And it should come as no surprise
that voluntary emergency services will be delivered at better quality and
less cost to the community.
Private emergency services have been a
part of life in Denmark for seventy years. Several American organizations
demonstrate that the idea works here, too. But government emergency
services, which are inevitably used as vehicles to advance various political
interests, are caught in a downward spiral of bureaucratization which in
some cities is leading to virtual breakdown.
The Cause of Government "Inefficiency"
Even in private organizations the identity
between providing the "service" and the organization's own interest is
only as close as competition and consumer actions can persuade companies
to make it. But where the coercive arm of government intrudes, and consumers
are no longer free to withdraw support from "services" they dislike, we
begin to witness for the first time organizations which develop into creatures
doing something other than what we think they're "supposed" to do.
Absent free choice, fire protection and ambulance service start to become
only the excuse, not the reason, for the fire department's existence.
The department evolves into a machine for dispensing pensions and lining
the pockets of those who manufacture chrome-plated trucks. It may
appear at first that the firemen is the winner here; but he is a comparative
piker in the competition to set up a fire protection monopoly and loot
it for political gain. Ultimately, he finds himself on the short
end of the stick.
Where the costs of emergency services
grow too large and the competition for dollars intensifies, we begin to
witness the retrenchment and withdrawal of fire and ambulance services.
In financially-strapped New York City, for example, the fire protection
has sunk to levels unseen since before the 1930's. In 1939, there
were 44,698 fire alarms; in 1976, 422,840. In 1938, 400 fires were
serious enough to warrant more than a first-alarm assignment of manpower
and equipment; in 1976, there were 4,365 such blazes. Seventy-one
people died by fire in 1939; 282 in 1976. But there are fewer firemen
working now than in 1939. Since 1974 sixteen engine and ladder companies
have been deactivated and eight firehouses closed. Firemen, who, in the
words of New York fireman and author Dennis Smith "...once held the most
prestigious position in the working-class civil service," now perceive
themselves as ordinary workers in a typical labor-management adversary
system ... working without distinction."1 Certainly, the fireman
has been one loser here. But the real victim is the consumer/taxpayer
whose fire protection is simply being withdrawn while his money is still
being taken. If the New York case is dramatic, it is by no means
unique.
The costs of government involvement tend
to be most serious in the large cities with their institutionalized municipal
fire departments. Because governmental involvement in emergency services
in most smaller communities is usually restricted to various "bargains"
struck with volunteer fire companies (e.g., capital aid for agreements
to provide certain kinds of service), direct political influences are easier
to identify and eliminate. Thus it is in the smaller communities
where the lessons of private enterprise emergency services are most immediately
applicable.
Private Emergency Services
Consider, for instance, the story of Rural/Metro
Fire Department, Inc., a private firm headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona
(pop. 96,000). Rural/Metro provides fire protection to thousands
of individual subscribers in several unincorporated communities in the
state. On a government contract basis the company provides fire protection
to an additional seven Arizona cities, ambulance service in five, security
patrol service in another five, and sworn police officers in one.2
In lightly populated areas, Rural/Metro
has entered the market by providing individual subscriber fire protection,
and watched its business grow with increasing development. Often
the builders of large residential projects such as Leisure World, Sun City,
and Fountain Hills contracted at the outset with Rural/Metro for fire and
security protection. When some of these communities (such as Paradise
Valley, Arizona) subsequently incorporated, residents chose to stay with
their individualized subscriber fire protection rather than have the local
government make one arrangement on behalf of everyone.
Rural/Metro's volume increased from $650,000
in 1970 to over $3,000,000 in 1975, and the company added 3 stations in
1971, 5 in 1972, 7 in 1973, 8 in 1974.3 Rural/Metro is not the only
such case. Private fire protection companies do business near Billings,
Montana (pop. 68,000), in Grant's Pass, Oregon (pop. 14,000), in the suburbs
of Nashville, Tennessee, and at the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral,
Florida.4 Together with the widespread acceptance of volunteer private
fire companies (which outnumber paid departments 21,000 to 3,500),5 the
success of private fire companies points up some real differences which
begin to appear as government involvement in community services is factored
out.
Some of these are illustrated in the service
which Rural/Metro provides its headquarters city of Scottsdale, Arizona.
Residents there obtain the lowest homeowners' fire insurance rates offered6
at a per capita fire protection cost one-fourth the national average
for cities of 50,000-100,000 population.7 While the national per
capita fire loss for the last twelve years has averaged about $12.00 a
year, Scottsdale's average during this time has been held to $4.44 per
year,8 and one study observed that if Scottsdale had obtained its fire,
protection from a traditional municipal fire department, the city would
(in 1973) have paid $475,000 instead of the actual $252,000 contract cost9
For fiscal 1975, Scottsdale paid Rural/Metro $498,355, and adding $145,322
of other fire-related outlays, the total came to $640,677 or $6.77 per
capita.10
Rural/Metro has innovated most deeply
in the area of manpower costs, which comprise about 90% of a paid fire
department's expenses. Instead of staffing for "worst case" disasters,
the company has chosen to maintain on-duty only the "core" of firemen needed
for normal response levels. This readily available manpower is then
supplemented in three ways. First, as a company which serves more
than one jurisdiction, Rural/Metro can send in many on-duty firemen from
outside a particular locality if a major emergency warrants doing so.
Since all of these men are trained in the same way and use the same equipment,
the company's internal "mutual Aid" is considerably streamlined and improved
over traditional arrangements between departments of separate municipalities.
Secondly, the company provides some technically off-duty firemen with radio
paging devices and counts on their response in the event of a large conflagration.
Third, Rural/Metro has established a paid reserve firefighting corps known
as the Auxiliaries. These reservists, who are selected and trained as rigorously
as on-line firemen, are retained by the company to respond to calls when
"on-duty" (wherever they might be) during one week out of every four.
Paid a monthly retainer fee plus wages for time spent in drilling and firefighting,
the Auxiliaries have proven such a success that the number responding to
calls averages higher than the number of Auxiliaries officially on duty.
With these innovations, Rural/Metro serves 96,000-person Scottsdale's mixed
residences, commercial centers and light industry with just 41 full-time
firefighters, 10 other full-time personnel, and 25 on-call Auxiliaries.
Contrast this to the national average of 118 full-time paid fire department
employees for cities in Scottsdale's population range.11
Rural/Metro has also branched out into
manufacturing its own innovative equipment. The company has introduced
"attack trucks," light-frame, swift vehicles which accompany large pumpers
on fire calls and free the pumper to return if the job is relatively minor.
Rural/Metro's inventive shop has produced a fire truck design incorporating
high-capacity four-inch hose, convenient quarter-turn hose couplings, and
a portable pump which enables the truck to perform as "two pumpers in one."12
One such truck was built at about half the cost of a standard truck offering
less than half the Scottsdale truck's water pumping capacity. Replacing
2½ inch hose with four-inch hose allowed fire hydrant spacing in
residential areas to be doubled.13 Further demonstrating the company
s resourcefulness is a remote-control fire hydrant valve presently under
development, and "The Snail"--a $3,000 tracked robot firefighter which
does the work of four men, trundles into blazes of up to 700 degrees Fahrenheit,
ignores smoke, and shrugs off danger.14
Why all this experimenting? Rural/Metro
chief Lou Witzeman answers, "We have the greatest incentive in the world
to innovate, to pioneer, to analyze every little step: sheer survival."15
Any subscriber to Rural/Metro's service can opt out by simply not renewing
the contract.
This spirit is not confined to American
shores. The Falck Company, a Danish concern established in 1906,
today provides half of Denmark with fire protection, ambulances, and other
emergency services. Falck's 132 stations respond to 30,000 calls
a year, protecting subscribers with 3,300 full-time rescue men, 1,200 part-time
firefighters, 400 administrative aides, 1,000 ambulances, 700 wreckers,
300 fire engines, 100 ladder trucks, 100 rescue cars, and 900 miscellaneous
trailers and vehicles.16 About two-thirds of Falck's business is
derived from servicing local government contracts to provide "basic" emergency
services to the Danish population, but the remaining third is comprised
of various supplementary services which the company eagerly provides to
some 850,000 family and corporate subscribers. Falck services run
the gamut, including road wrecker assistance, highway patrols, weather
reports, free emergency first-aid kits, coastal rescues, diving and salvage,
aerial ambulance transport, and an animal rescue service answering 30,000
calls yearly.17
A caveat, now. As government contractors,
Rural/Metro and Falck are no more fully free-enterprise than is, say Con
Ed or the railroad industry. Such enterprises still receive support
from two tools of government coercion: the legislative monopoly and the
tax dollar. But just as it makes a difference whether or not Con
Ed and Conrail are nationalized, so does it matter whether Rural/Metro's
and Falck's emergency services are operated directly by municipal departments
or not. Contracting out the function eliminates one influence
for expropriation of the citizen--the politically powerful municipal union--and
enables the municipality to evaluate the service more or less free of political
pressure. The rush of innovations which ensues upon even this mild
"privatization" is suggestive of better things to come when the fire department
is required to give up its legislative monopoly and seek voluntary consumer
revenues.
Returning to the United States, we discover
that 480,000 people in nine parishes (counties) of rural Louisiana are
served by a free-market ambulance and paramedic service. Acadian
Ambulance Service, Inc. is a profit oriented firm financed by $15-a-year
subscriptions from some 74,000 families. Member families receive
free emergency transportation and reduced rates on non-emergency ambulance
transport; the basic emergency service is available to everyone in the
area. Acadian features excellent paramedic service, a radio network for
communicating medical information between moving ambulance and hospital,
and a fleet of 24 ambulances operating from 13 stations in a coordinated
dispatching network.18
Many ambulances have traditionally been
operated by private volunteer fire companies, especially in smaller communities.
But the idea can go big-time, as witness the Bethesda/Chevy Chase Rescue
Squad, Inc., a volunteer ambulance, paramedic, and rescue service
sustained wholly by fundraising drives, gifts, and income from investments.
With an annual budget of about a quarter million dollars, the volunteer
company answers 8,000 calls yearly in northwest Washington, D.C. and suburban
Maryland using six paramedic vans, a mobile intensive care unit, a crash
truck, three ambulances, and a rescue boat.19 Judging from the Rescue
Squad's track record, the key to success with volunteer emergency services
is professionalism and high morale. As a consequence, the squad can
be staffed with 150 volunteers, and applicants crowd the waiting lists--and
the surrounding community gratefully supports the service.
Libertarian Proposals
What will Libertarians do about emergency
services?
* Libertarians will put fire departments
and ambulance corps on a voluntary basis. Where volunteer departments
or private companies already exist, nothing needs be done except to guarantee
that local government not meddle in the relationship between the company
and the consumers of emergency service protection. Communities which
presently contract with other local governments or private providers will
find the transition to a complete free market easy: provider organizations
will simply be asked to seek the patronage of customers directly and on
a voluntary basis. Local government subsidies, exclusive franchises,
and any municipal department will be phased out in favor of returning the
citizen his freedom to choose the emergency service he desires. Any
savings to the municipality should be passed through as tax cuts.
A local department need not necessarily be dismantled; it will simply be
required to support itself in some voluntary fashion. Whether this
means conversion to a profit-oriented or "volunteer," cooperative basis
is a matter for the department--after it is privatized--to decide.
Ultimately, the free competition of differing ideas for the favor of the
customers will determine which pattern of operation best suits the needs
of each community, and of different people within communities.
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