Arizona’s ongoing housing crisis has worsened staffing problems for firefighters and first responders in the Prescott-Quad Cities area. They’re finding it more difficult to land affordable homes near their jobs. It’s causing positions to go unfilled and forcing departments to hire from elsewhere. Officials also say it chips away at local communities and is a financial drain on city governments and fire districts. KNAU’s Ryan Heinsius spoke with Central Arizona Fire and Medical Authority Fire Chief Scott Freitag about a study at Northern Arizona University that’s seeking to find a solution to the issue.
Ryan Heinsius: Firefighting has traditionally been thought of as a really good, steady job. How did we come to a point where firefighters can’t afford to live in the communities they serve?
Scott Freitag: It is a steady job, but we live in areas where, throughout COVID and a little bit before COVID, but especially since COVID, we’ve had a significant influx of people from out of state into the Quad Cities, the Prescott area. And what we’re seeing is the home values and the home prices have gone up so quickly and so significantly that our folks, as newer firefighters, even firefighters that’ve been on for a while, they can’t get into the housing market and even the rental market is a challenge. We’re 98-99% full on rentals. And even a rental for a two-bedroom, one-bath can be upwards of $2,500 a month.
RH: Firefighter pay, like many professions, hasn’t kept pace with inflation and other factors. Couldn’t the housing crisis just be solved by increasing salaries across the board?
SF: It’s an approach that our firefighters would absolutely love. The challenge is that we are funded by tax dollars, and there are only so many tax dollars to go around. And specifically with fire districts, fire districts across the state, we only have one source of funding and that’s property taxes. And so, we’re trying to balance the need to increase staffing to deal with the increased call volume we’re seeing. And so, to pay a new firefighter 80, 90, $100,000 a year, there’s no way for us to fund that.
RH: What is this study designed to accomplish?
SF: The research team over the next 10 to 12 months will be looking at development projects, types of housing, finance options for first responders. It’s looking at a combination of potential solutions. The great thing about a research project like this is, should we need some sort of legislative action, whether it be at the state level or the federal level, we will have a comprehensive document, a set of research recommendations from a third party at NAU, that we could go to our federal partners or our state partners and say, here’s the problem, here’s the research, here’s the solution. Can you help us run whatever bill in order to assist first responders?
RH: If this problem goes unaddressed, paint a picture for me about how that could affect firefighting in local communities.
SF: You’re going to have more positions that may go unfilled. We’re going to end up with a lot of what I call commuter firefighters. We’re going to hire people in, they don’t live in our community because they can’t, they’re going to drive up from Phoenix or drive in from somewhere else, an hour, hour-and-a-half. And then, once they’re established and we’ve invested a lot of money, they’re going to continue to look for jobs closer to home so they don’t have all the windshield time, they don’t have to commute. And so, they’re going to end up taking those jobs, as we’ve seen. If I lose someone within the first year, 18 months of employment, $100,000, $150,000 just walked out the door that I invested, now I have to start over again. And that’s a cost to the taxpayer. The other side of it is culturally, historically firefighting has been a community-driven profession, so a lot of folks grow up in the community, get hired at the local fire department and they maintain a culture that is really reminiscent of the community itself. Well, as you start hiring people in who’ve never lived here and who aren’t going to live here, eventually you erode some of that culture. So, it’s not just a financial impact, it’s not just a shortage of people to fill positions, which is a challenge, but it’s also a disconnect between community and the fire service, and we need to somehow avoid that. My hope is that we can kind of get ahead of this problem and turn the ship before it just becomes ingrained.
