[VINMAN]

As Glen stated, one of the problems with alot of volunteer depts ( including mine) is the fact that the towns are no longer like Mayberry. Where everyone lives and works in town. A huge portion of my town are transplanted NYers, myself included. Most of us still commute to the city. We do have a number of guys that work in town. But not like we used to. We cover a 3 1/2 square mile area., we work out of 3 houses. Have seven pieces of apparatus. Our response times are usually decent. But I see in the near future , having to possibly go with paid drivers during the day. The towns ALS is paid. One of the problems is we have a number of nursing homes, retirement and assisted living communities in town. So that keeps the first aid squad busy as all hell.
We have some depts around us that have response times to rival most paid stations. Others that are sometimes scary. But those depts have the building density and area coverage that does not warrant a paid dept. So its a sticky situation there.

My dept is funded by the taxpayers. We are a fire district. Our fire budget this yr, I believe was $1.8 mil. compared to the school budget , which was $68 mil.