Key Largo Fire Department struggling to stay volunteer
It’s a slice of small-town America that’s disappearing across the country. Just like the mom-and-pop hardware store, the volunteer fire department is being replaced with bigcity professional departments.
In the Florida Keys, only two all-volunteer departments have managed to hang on, along with volunteers serving on paid departments. They keep busy tending to injured car crash victims on the Oversea Highway, and putting out boat and house fires.
But Key Largo, the largest of the volunteer fire departments left in Monroe County and around since the 1950s, is struggling for volunteers. And major change may not be far behind.
The department’s leadership and the taxing board that oversees its budget said this week that the all-volunteer model is becoming unsustainable as the cost of living continues to increase in the Keys. A proposal to bring on more paid firefighters would mean a tax increase.
“It’s the end of an era, which is happening across the country,” said Frank Conklin, a volunteer firefighter and elected commissioner on the fivemember Key Largo Volunteer Fire-Rescue and Emergency Medical Services District.
In Key Largo, the typical volunteer isn’t responding to the fire alarm simply as a matter of civic responsibility. Volunteers are generally state-certified firefighter serving to maintain qualifications until they get hired by a paid department somewhere else in South Florida. Less common these days is the local worker or business owner taking time out of a busy day to either serve a shift at the fire station or leave work to respond to a call.
Volunteers have bunks at the Key Largo department’s two firehouses, but most live in Miami-Dade County. Key Largo volunteers aren’t paid a salary, but they do receive a stipend for fuel and food.
While the department enjoys the expertise of having certified members fill its ranks, turnover is an issue. Chief Don Bock said that this year, turnover among his roughly 35 volunteers was between 10 and 15 percent. As soon as a paid position at a larger department opens, Key Largo loses firefighters.
It’s a problem that has plagued other areas in the Keys — so much so that there are all-volunteer departments have disappeared south of the fourisland Village of Islamorada, Bock said.
“Layton was the last to dissolve two or three years ago,” he said of the tiny incorporated city on Long Key.
Bock is a retired Monroe
County Fire Rescue firefighter and medic who has led both the Key Largo fire department and Ambulance Corps as a volunteer since 2013.
Tavernier, a small community in between Key Largo and Plantation Key in Islamorada, still has a volunteer department with 17 active members, according to Monroe County. Paid departments in Ocean Reef, Islamorada and Monroe County also still have volunteer firefighters in their ranks.
Departments in the Lower Keys, including Big Coppitt and Big Pine keys, have come under the umbrella of Monroe County Fire Rescue, which has about 120 firefighters, according to Chief Richard Callahan.
Keys departments are not alone in trying to overcome the challenges of recruiting and retaining volunteer firefighters. According to the latest numbers from the National Volunteer Fire Council, most of the country’s volunteers, 32 percent, are at least 50 years old, while only 24 percent are under 30.
The population of Key Largo, the northernmost key in the archipelago, is around 10,433 people, according to the latest U.S. Census information. That’s down from almost 12,000 people counted in the
2000 Census. A significant portion of the population left the Keys after Hurricane Wilma in 2005, and any rebound was diminished when even more people left after Hurricane Irma in 2017.
But while the population has fallen, the cost of living hasn’t — with some people holding down more than one job to make ends meet. That makes it difficult to not only volunteer to be a firefighter, but also to take the time and money to become certified.
“It’s not the little town it used to be,” Commissioner Bob Thomas said at a meeting of the district board Monday night.
The department already has had to turn to paid employees to ensure its stations are adequately staffed for emergency calls.
Key Largo has 13 fulltime firefighters, including captains and lieutenants, as well as engine drivers. In the 2019-2020 fiscal year budget, the district set aside $778,711 for salaries, $80,000 for medical benefits, $40,000 for 401K retirement plans and $110,000 for overtime.
Even the volunteers get a little something. The district pays a stipend for volunteers of $83 per 12hour shift at the department’s two stations, according to the budget.
An effort is underway to hire more paid firefighters. But to do so, the district needs the ability to raise taxes above the mandated cap of $1 per every $1,000 of assessed property value. The threshold was written into the enabling legislation when the taxing district was created in 2005.
Andy Tobin, a local attorney, former commissioner and one of the founders of the district, said the cap was set in place to ensure Key Largo would pay less in taxes for emergency services than other areas of unincorporated Monroe County, which pays above $2, while expanding the fire department.
But that’s not working anymore, he said.
“We have not been able to grow a volunteer fire department,” he said.
In September, the commissioners approved the $1 max for this fiscal year’s $5.6 million operating budget.
Raising the cap requires a voter referendum, and commissioners would like that to either be placed on the Aug. 8 primary ballot or in November on Election Day. They said this week that they want to set the limit to $2, even though they don’t believe that rate would need to be approved in the near future. Commissioners debated setting a lower number, but they settled on $2 so they wouldn’t have to go back to voters if they needed to go higher.
“If they don’t want us to increase it, they will let us know with their vote,” board Chairman Tony
Allen said.
Adding to commissioners’ pressure is the push by at least eight of the paid firefighters to become employees of the district, rather that the fire department, which is a nonprofit corporation. They want that so they can qualify for the state pension, get union representation and cancer insurance.
If that happens, it would likely mean the district would have to hire a paid chief for at least $80,000 a year, Thomas said. Bock performs the job for free now.
Said Thomas: “That’s going to have to be a major factor.”