The smell of sausage and pancakes fills the Belle Valley Volunteer Fire Department every fall. But the breakfast isn’t for the firefighters. With just 28 people on the roster, feeding the crew wouldn’t require more than a couple of boxes of batter.
This story is part 2 of 5 installments of our "Sound the Alarm" series. This long-term investigation reveals the crisis facing volunteer fire departments in Ohio and digs into potential solutions.
This meal is far more important: It’s one of the Southeast Ohio department’s most crucial fundraisers of the year. Families of the firefighters are enlisted to keep it running. Spouses pour orange juice, kids wipe the crumbs off the folding tables and recruits spend their morning not fighting fires, but tending to the flames under a sizzling pan of eggs.
In the three to four hours of fundraising, fire chief Ed McKee predicts they’re likely to pull in around $5,000 to $6,000. It may not sound like much, but the Noble County department needs every dollar.
Between a levy and a couple of contracts with the county, their annual budget usually sits around $58,000 — less than the annual average wage in the United States. McKee is expected to protect the lives within his sprawling rural community in Noble County with the equivalent of one person’s annual paycheck.
“Columbus can get anything they want. Down here, we have to fight for everything we get,” McKee said.
In addition to training to respond to fires and chemical spills, volunteer departments like McKee’s increasingly need community support to keep their residents protected. They are forced to rely on fundraisers — gun raffles, 5K races, bowling tournaments, barbecue dinners and, yes, pancakes — to afford equipment with price tags that can reach seven digits.
This is the reality of a volunteer firefighting department. While major cities have staffed rosters paid for with tax revenue, the vast majority of Ohio’s fire departments work on a volunteer basis. Some drop everything while working their full-time jobs to be paid a small stipend to respond to a call. Others are unpaid.
That means when many Ohioans call 911, the people who show up to help in their darkest hours are volunteers. In wealthy suburban volunteer departments, they can often arrive on the scene quickly with new technology in tow. But for rural low-income areas, it’s more likely to be a volunteer who rushes to the scene from their other job.
How the other half lives
The Gates Mills main fire engine was custom-built for the station’s needs. The suburban department bought it in 2020, outfitted with a 750-gallon water tank, bulletproof vests and a remote-controlled pump panel. And that’s just the station’s first line of defense.
If that engine is not available, they have two more older models ready to assist. They also have a pickup truck and an SUV at their disposal.
They are in a good place financially. Even so, Capt. Mike Feig, who also serves as the department’s fire marshal, said it will take a lot of planning and saving to replace the oldest engine in their fleet, which is nearing 40. Prices for equipment have skyrocketed in recent years.
“It's almost double the cost,” he said.
The Northeast Ohio volunteer department operates on around $400,000 per year. That’s more than six times the total annual budget of rural Belle Valley, but still less than half the average cost of a new engine.
Every fire department in Ohio has a different budget that depends more on voters than on the success of a sausage breakfast. In wealthier, fast-growing suburbs, levies translate into newer rigs, finer stations and the leverage to offer incoming recruits something more than turnout gear — the protective equipment firefighters wear — and a handshake.
It also means they can invest in quicker response times. Gates Mills cross-trains its station’s service workers as volunteer firefighters. So, when a call comes in, those workers are guaranteed to be in the community to respond quickly.
On top of that, in the summer of 2024, the department moved to a part-time model. They pay one firefighter over $20 an hour to man the station over the weekend, when the most calls come in.
Even with all these advantages, Gates Mills needs help to respond to major incidents. Their trucks are out minutes faster, but they still sometimes have to rely on the career departments around them, whose resources far outnumber even better-off volunteer stations like theirs.
“We are very lucky around here that we are surrounded by all full-time staff departments. That's not the case in the rural areas,” Feig said.
Making ends meet
Belle Valley’s fire department doesn’t have the luxury of being surrounded by career departments, nor does it have the latest equipment and money left in the bank to aid its response times. Far from it. McKee’s department, with its $58,000 budget, requires the resourcefulness of a Boy Scout.
“It's rural Ohio,” he said. “It ain't by the book, but you've gotta do what you’ve gotta do.”
For heat, they burn motor oil, donated from a local trucking company. For maintenance, they count on a local towing company to keep the engines running. Their last tanker wasn’t so much bought as it was built. A Zanesville company donated a 1978 truck that had been used at a stone quarry. Mechanically-minded recruits fashioned it with water pumps and transformed it into a tanker. It served them for a decade before they were able to replace it.
Today, their main fire engine is 20 years old – around the age that the National Fire Protection Agency recommends replacement. But an upgrade isn’t quite in the budget yet.
“That truck, to replace it now is over a million and a half dollars,” McKee explained. “That's a lot of sausage patties.”
Volunteer departments in sparsely populated areas face a structural disadvantage: Their tax bases are so small that even basic operating costs are a strain.
But fewer residents doesn’t mean lower expenses, McKee said. Keeping the lights on, filling the tank for long rural runs and the upkeep of aging apparatus burns through budgets before the cost of training or gear can even be considered.
And although rural departments may be going on fewer calls, they still are expected to replace their gear and equipment at the same rate as a career department. Every 10 years, new helmets, hoods, gloves and boots have to be bought – regardless of whether they’ve ever been in a fire.
“It makes it so hard because you got gear out there in the building that you had ordered and (then) that (recruit) left. Some of it's never been worn, but they say it's no good after 10 years,” McKee said.
To cover the gaps, Belle Valley applies every chance they get for state and federal grants. Some years, McKee said, they work with a grant writer to apply on behalf of the department. It’s another expense, but one that can pay off in protective gear or specialized washing machines to decontaminate their clothes after a fire run.
But paying for staff, even just part time or per call, is out of the question for many rural areas in Ohio.
“Financially, we just can't do it. It's impossible,” he said.
Why it matters
The inability to pay for part-time staffing is not just inconvenient. It can be life threatening.
In an analysis of response time data from the Ohio Department of Commerce, Ideastream Public Media found that living in rural areas, where distances to hospitals far exceed urban areas, equates to longer response times.
But it’s about more than just geographic distance. The income of the community also impacts emergency response times. Mean response times tended to be longer for incidents in lower-income ZIP codes served by part-time and volunteer fire departments.
State Fire Marshal Kevin Reardon said these higher response times are the difference between life and death for the communities they serve.
“With fires and EMS runs, it's all about seconds. It's not minutes, it's about seconds,” Reardon said.
These stretched budgets are also dangerous for the volunteer departments themselves.
When a radio tower outside Concord Green Township in rural Southwest Ohio needed a new antenna to strengthen their signal to medical helicopters, hiring outside help wasn’t in the budget, according to Reardon.
The town needed that protection, so two volunteer firefighters, Fire Chief Ralph Stegbauer, 71, and Fire Captain Jeffery Skaggs, 62, decided to fix it themselves, instead of asking their local trustees for another grand.
They placed a mechanical lift atop a trailer to get enough height to remove the old antenna. But as they were coming down to fetch the new part, the mechanical lift toppled and threw them off. The men died on the scene, days after Thanksgiving, in 2023.
Reardon attended their funerals, held on the same day.
“What they did is not uncharacteristic. It just had a bad outcome,” Reardon said. “But volunteers, they're doing it for nothing.”
Community’s responsibility
Fire tax levies are still largely supported statewide. In the last election, 85% of local fire levies succeeded.
But Don Alexander, a rural firefighter in Wayne Township in Appalachian Ohio, said they’re starting to feel the tide turn. The levies don’t excel at the ballot box the way they used to. And he’s worried what the trend will mean for future levies.
“Fire levies on the ballot probably passed (with) 90% voting yes. Now we're down to about 60% that votes yes,” Alexander said.
The 2023 state task force formed to address the struggles of volunteer firefighters offered a report with several recommendations to improve departments’ financial situations, like dedicating gas tax revenue to Fire Department and EMS funding or reallocating property taxes toward researching solutions. Neither of those suggestions have been passed by Ohio legislators.
The State Fire Marshal’s Office offers millions of dollars in grants for equipment, training and radios to aid struggling departments. But even with a large pot of money, the grants remain competitive. Stations in rural areas that go on less-frequent runs say they can’t count on being awarded money each year.
“It's also a lot of time invested into something that, more often than not, you don't get it,” Roundhead Fire Chief Adam Gratz in rural Hardin County said. “You might spend 100 hours doing grants before you get one.”
And they face another potential threat: A citizen led-effort is seeking to eliminate property taxes, from which volunteer departments get the majority of their shoestring budgets. The group has collected over 100,000 signatures, a quarter of what they need to put the measure on the ballot. If enacted, rural departments say their fate is sealed.
“If that happens, we try telling them (their) fire department will be non-existent,” Alexander of Wayne Township said.
More with less
That reality is already starting to set in for McKee and his crew in Belle Valley. A marquee sign outside the station keeps a running tally of all the calls they’ve responded to in the year. They made over 300 calls in 2025 — surpassing the annual average of Gates Mills.
Departments like McKee’s are being asked to do more with less. The call volume of Ohio fire departments who classified themselves as volunteer increased 23% between 2020 and 2024, according to an Ideastream analysis of data from the Department of Commerce. The Martins Ferry Volunteer Fire Department alone responded to more than 1,000 calls in 2024.
“(Ohio is) among the top five or six busiest fire services in the nation. And those numbers just keep going up,” Ohio Fire Marshal Reardon said.
Belle Valley’s response area grows with each passing year, as nearby departments — facing similar struggles of not enough people and not enough money — ask for his rural department’s help.
The nearby Reinersville Volunteer Fire Department is trying to figure out how to fix a leaky roof that costs around double the money it brings in yearly from its levy — around $6,000. They’re considering reducing services. If they do, Belle Valley and other surrounding volunteer departments will be the ones to take over some of their coverage area.
“Everybody's fighting the same battle,” McKee said. “It's awful.”
It’s not clear to McKee how much further his department can be stretched. But he is certain that adding more pancakes to the pan won’t save them.
He believes the only way to keep going is to look beyond their small town to a countywide levy. But that would take convincing, and he’s not certain where they’ll find the time to campaign.
He worries it’ll take a tragedy to see any action.
“I look down the road 10 years from now, what's Belle Valley Fire Department gonna be?” McKee said. “It’s very scary.”
Tomorrow, we’ll learn about how volunteer departments are responding to crises with a fraction of the training of career departments.
Abigail Bottar contributed reporting to this story.
