Three years ago, when people called 911 in Tiltonsville, they didn’t know if anyone would show up.
This story is part five of our five-part series "Sound the Alarm." This long-term investigation reveals the crisis facing volunteer fire departments in Ohio and digs into potential solutions.
The origins of the small village, located in Eastern Ohio across the Ohio River from West Virginia, date back to the late 1700s, but the Tiltonsville Fire Department has only been around for a little more than a century. It wasn’t established until 1917, after three people died in a house fire.
The first home for the fire department was a one-story building. The fire engine was a Ford Model T. A bell on top of the firehouse served as the alarm system. Eight men staffed the department. They each paid 10 cents a month in dues to buy equipment.
Over the course of the 20th century, the size of the volunteer department grew. From eight firefighters to 22. From 22 to 60. Pictures of past rosters line the hallway of the current fire department. Volunteers proudly grin at the camera in their matching uniforms. They used to debate who would stand in the back row. But around the 1990s, the numbers started to dwindle. Fewer and fewer people fill the frame.
During a visit to Tiltonsville in the fall, the station was as quiet as the town. Instead of a firehouse dog, a beta fish swam around a small tank.
“It’s changed over the years,” Chief Michael Lollini said, gazing at the wall of photos. “Manpower back in the day was 50-some people, but as time went on, the number of volunteers just kept getting smaller and smaller.”
Lollini got involved in the department when he was just a kid, joining the cadet program when he was 12. He got his firefighter certification and became a volunteer firefighter with the department in 2002. In 2021, he became chief.
And in 2023, he took on one more responsibility: campaign manager. He attended town halls, knocked on doors and talked to influential people. He wasn’t running for office or campaigning for another politician.
He was trying to save his community.
A funding lifeline
Staffing isn’t a problem unique to Tiltonsville. The number of active volunteer certifications statewide has decreased nearly 15% since January 2020, according to data from the Ohio Department of Public Safety. In Tiltonsville, people started noticing, Lollini said.
Sometimes, people waited almost an hour for an ambulance to arrive, Lollini said.
“You call 911, you expect someone to show up, and when they don’t, now you’re asking yourself, ‘What are you doing?’ We weren’t fulfilling our obligation,” he said. “And there was actually people that died waiting for an ambulance to show up, and the family would come to you and ask, ‘What are you guys doing to fix it?’ And it’s a legit question, and that’s why we did what we did.”
Lollini and others began pitching to their community the creation of a joint fire district with two other municipalities funded by a new property tax levy.
They had tried to put a levy on the ballot before, he said, but it never gained traction. This time, with the neighboring communities of Rayland and Warren Township, they hit the pavement hard, canvassing and attending town halls, meetings and public gatherings.
“I think sticking our neck out is an understatement but made it clear that this was going to be the norm moving forward,” Lollini said. “If we didn’t get something, this was going to be the norm, and eventually it was gonna be to the point where I couldn’t guarantee if we would be here five years from now, just ‘cause our finances were not the greatest.”
On election night, Lollini stayed at the fire station for hours, nervously watching the results come in. They looked good, but he didn’t want to get his hopes up. When he awoke early the next day, he saw the levy passed by 220 votes.
“Relieved is probably an understatement,” Lollini said. “I told people if I could have done a cartwheel, I would’ve.”
Tiltonsville officially started staffing part-time firefighters on June 1, 2024. The department now has a roster of 22 paid part-time firefighters and 15 volunteers.
“Paid staffing does benefit people. Having people here makes a world of a difference versus wondering if anyone is going to show up or not,” Lollini said. “Forty-five minutes is a long time waiting for somebody. But now, we’re getting that under 10, and we’re showing up. And it’s a huge sigh of relief for everybody.”
Are joint fire districts the future?
A joint fire district seems like an obvious solution to counter the pressures of shrinking volunteer rosters and rising costs. West of Dayton in Preble County, the Shawnee Fire District provides services to Gratis, Gratis Township and West Elkton. In Northeast Ohio, the Lawrence Township Fire Department combined efforts with the Canal Fulton Fire Department to provide better service to their communities. Joint fire districts are popping up across the state.
“We think there’s about 100 of them throughout the state, and I say we think because due to what they name themselves, we can’t really tell,” State Fire Marshal Kevin Reardon said. “A lot of them have named themselves the ‘Danville Joint Fire Department’ or something like that, so it sticks out pretty easily. But what we’ve found is there’s more out there that have that joint fire district model. That’s just not what they call themselves.”
The motivations for a joint fire district vary, he said. In some cases, departments have problems finding enough volunteers during the daytime. For other departments, it’s finding enough coverage at night.
“Under the joint fire district model, they’ve been able to staff it with two or three people,” Reardon said. “That’s a huge start. That’s a huge start, so they’ve been successful.”
In Portage County, five townships are currently considering joining forces. Five chiefs. Five fire stations. Five aging fire tankers that are only used a few times a year. Five departments fighting for staffing in a relatively small hiring pool. It’s too much for the rural corner of Northeast Ohio.
The townships had considered a joint fire district twice before, but each time, the idea didn’t get any traction. One of the five departments is in Paris Township, where Derek Reed has served as fire chief since 2013.
Paris Township made the move to add some part-time staffing to its all-volunteer force a few years ago, Reed said.
“We had literally no volunteer staff during the day,” he said.
The department relied on a private ambulance service to respond to the majority of its calls during the day, Reed said, but even that wasn’t dependable because it prioritized taking calls that would pay more. Sometimes it took 45 minutes for an ambulance to arrive on scene. The department was losing money.
“We use ambulance transports, ambulance calls, as part of our funding for the fire department,” Reed said. “So, by not responding to those daytime calls, we were not able to basically bill or collect money to support the ambulance side of things. So we were kind of hurting ourselves there.”
They put a levy on the ballot, primarily to begin paying for part-time staffing but also to support department operations. The levy passed. The department had the funds to staff two firefighters at the station every day from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., paying volunteers per call to fill in the rest of the hours. But the funding was just enough to get them started, not enough to pay a competitive wage to sustain staffing.
“We’re staffing maybe two or three days in a pay period,” he said. “So probably I’d say four to five days a month right now. So it’s pretty rough.”
They make do, knowing they may eventually have to go back to the taxpayers to pass another levy to keep the pay competitive, Reed said.
Asking for more money is going to be the main hurdle in getting a joint fire district off the ground, he said.
“I’m sure it’s going to be a very big expense, even though it’s going to be kind of distributed amongst the other townships,” he said. “When you’re looking at hiring full-time staff with the pensions and the retirement plans and health insurance and just everyday operational costs, it’s going to be a lot of money.”
Then there’s the problem of identity.
“People do not want to lose Paris Township written on their firetruck,” Reed said. “They don’t want to lose that, ‘That’s my firetruck, and I paid for that firetruck. And that’s my community.’”
But if they can get the community on board, the benefits would be numerous, including reduced response times, shared resources and less of a burden on a single department’s budget.
A joint fire district is still years away for the townships in Portage County. They need data and cost estimates before voters in all five townships can weigh in on the plan, but it’s worth the effort, State Fire Marshal Kevin Reardon said.
“It gives your citizens a break,” he said. “You’re not going back to them as often for fire levies. You’re not going back for special ballot issues.”
The debate over property taxes
Property taxes have been the hot topic at the Ohio Statehouse amid skyrocketing home values in recent years. State lawmakers have introduced and passed numerous bills to lessen the burden on homeowners, but a citizen-led ballot initiative gathering signatures aims to eliminate all property taxes, which would devastate funding for many volunteer fire departments and joint fire districts.
“I’m afraid that’s what people are not looking at,” Tiltonsville Fire Chief Michael Lollini said. “They’re looking at, ‘Ooh ,I don’t have to pay this property tax anymore … but they’re not looking at the aftermath of it.”
State Rep. Thomas Hall (R-Madison Township) is both an advocate of property tax relief in the Ohio House and a volunteer firefighter. He followed his dad into the service at the Madison Township Fire Department in Southwest Ohio, where he still picks up shifts while balancing his responsibilities in Columbus.
“If this gets abolished next year at the ballot box, I will be the first one at the table fighting for first responders to get paid,” he said.
Hall said he gets calls every day from constituents who support abolishing all property taxes. He hopes these conversations will ease up when people see their property taxes later this year.
“I think people are starting to realize there’s a lot of unintended consequences to not having your own fire protection, because they pay taxes now and levies now on our fire departments,” he said. “And if those go away, they may save money in the short term, but the moment they have that emergency or that situation, it’s going to be a moment of regret.”
Even if the charter amendment fails, firefighters are worried the disdain for property taxes will begin to outweigh the usual support for local fire department levies.
“The fire service has never heard that before. Fire levies traditionally are no-brainers. You don’t even have to campaign, they just pass," Reardon said. “But now we’ve got that problem of people simply can’t afford it. They’re not saying no to safety. They’re saying no to their own budget. They can’t do it, and that’s difficult.”
What did the task force recommend?
Researching the benefits of joint fire districts was just one of more than 30 recommendations the Ohio Task Force on Volunteer Fire Service made when it issued its report in January 2023.
The Fire Marshal’s Office has acted on several of the recommendations under its jurisdiction: establishing a full-time recruitment/retention coordinator, coordinating public service announcements about the need for volunteer firefighters and waiving all fees at the Ohio Fire Academy for volunteer firefighters.
But about a dozen of the recommendations made in the report can only be addressed by the state legislature and have not yet been passed, specifically the recommendations to create a consistent funding source for volunteer departments and to establish a benefits program.
“I think it is a service that a lot of people take for granted,” Hall said, “and it’s a service that a lot of people in the legislature take for granted.”
He’s introduced bills to establish a tax credit for volunteer firefighters and ensure fire hydrants are tested regularly, but they’ve either failed to gain support or received pushback.
“I do think the legislature wants to be a part in this and wants to help out,” he said, “but I just think it hasn’t been a priority.”
Since the task force report was published, state lawmakers have expanded grant funding for equipment and training. They have also expanded a loan program for vehicle purchases or building additions, but volunteer departments are still left with a patchwork funding system of levies, grants, loans and money they raise themselves.
Many of the recommendations focus on recruitment, ways to encourage people to join a volunteer department or convince them to stay. The report suggests public service leave, tax incentives for businesses that give volunteer firefighters paid leave, an awards program that functions like a pension, tuition vouchers and local property tax abatements. Thus far, the legislature has only passed a $1,000 income tax credit for volunteer firefighters.
State Sen. Tim Schaffer (R-Lancaster) introduced a comprehensive bill last spring to revise volunteer firefighter law. Senate Bill 195 includes many of the recommendations from the task force report.
“It’s gonna be difficult for the legislature, like in most instances, because it involves money,” Reardon said. “And we’ve gotta look at things where we’re gonna get a big bang for the buck, so he’s [Schaffer’s] got a good start.”
Schaffer declined to be interviewed for this series.
The task force also recommended updating the volunteer firefighter certificate to meet standards laid out in the National Fire Protection Association 1010, a consolidated set of standards for firefighters. In the wake of the 2023 East Palestine train derailment, the National Transportation Safety Board recommended it, too, due to the absence of hazmat training.
The Ohio Division of EMS, under the Ohio Department of Public Safety, is taking action. Effective June 30, 2030, the 36-hour volunteer firefighter certification course will no longer be offered. No new volunteer firefighter certificates will be issued after that date. Volunteer departments will still exist in Ohio, but all new firefighters that staff them will be required to get additional training.
Firefighters with only the volunteer certification will be able to keep their volunteer certification or transition to other levels of fire service, like new certifications for fire apparatus driver/operator-pumper or fire department exterior support person. With more training, they could also transition to Firefighter I or II, the certification needed to be a firefighter at a paid department.
“At some point downstream, we know that Firefighter I has to be the standard so that no matter what firefighter in this state responds to a call, he or she will be trained to the full professional standard of Firefighter I that permits them to go in and do interior attack, do all of the exterior functions, as well as understand all of the threats based on hazardous materials awareness training included in their education,” Division of EMS Executive Director Robert Wagoner said.
Creating the two new certifications were also recommendations from the task force report. These certifications should be easy for volunteer firefighters to transition to, Wagoner said.
“We believe that a large percentage of those out there who currently have a volunteer firefighter certification have probably completed the equivalent education to quickly transition to those two new levels,” he said.
Some people only want to drive a firetruck, not burst through doors of burning buildings, particularly retired firefighters, Reardon said.
“That’s an entire group of people that are kind of left out there that have serious skills and experience that could be put to use in their community if they wanna do it,” he said.
The exterior support person certificate will allow people to support a volunteer department without having to drive the truck or enter a burning building.
The future of volunteer fire departments
Who’s in charge of making the volunteer firefighter system better? What happens when a volunteer department runs out of funding and manpower and has to close its doors?
It’s ultimately up to individual communities to make those decisions, Reardon said.
“The state of Ohio has never gotten into how we operate and fund volunteer departments because of home rule, number one,” he said. “These are all jurisdictions. They’re owned by the local community, the local people.”
He recommends volunteer fire departments struggling to make ends meet have honest conversations with their communities.
“Sit down with your community and ask them to list, give you a list of their expectations for the fire department,” Reardon said. “Start scratching off on that list of expectations what you can’t deliver and why. Just go down through the list. We can’t deliver paramedic service. We can’t do that. You want it. We can’t do it, and here’s why. And that’s really helped that dialogue between the community and the fire chiefs.”
That worked in rural communities in Ohio like Tiltonsville and Paris Township, but what if the financial support just isn’t there?
“Those people just won’t have service. They won’t have service,” Reardon said. “When they call for EMS, nobody's gonna come. They’re going to have to rely on their own transportation, family member, friend, neighbor, whatever, and if there’s a fire, it’s just gonna burn.”
Kendall Crawford contributed reporting for this story.