Minoa, N.Y., Hires 20 Part-Time Firefighters as Volunteer Ranks Shrink

By MES Dispatch Staff

The Briefing

• The village of Minoa, New York, hired 20 part-time firefighters this summer after its volunteer fire department shrank from about 80 members to roughly 30, with only 18 to 19 regularly responding.
• The Minoa Village Board voted unanimously in late July to hire the new firefighters, adding more than $560,000 to the village’s $5.7 million budget.
• Village officials said no single emergency prompted the decision, but the department was regularly missing calls, particularly during daytime hours when most volunteers work other jobs.
• The new hires, 18 men and two women, will each earn $27 an hour working four-hour daytime shifts, without health benefits; none are current Minoa volunteers, but all have at least five years of firefighting experience.
• Minoa is also part of ongoing talks with two neighboring villages about a potential town-wide fire department merger, though no decision has been made.

MINOA, N.Y. — The village of Minoa has hired 20 part-time firefighters after its volunteer ranks fell from about 80 members to roughly 30, with only 18 to 19 regularly responding to calls, according to Fire Chief Donald Grevelding and Mayor William Brazill.

The Minoa Village Board voted 5-0 in late July to bring on the new hires, adding more than $560,000 to the village’s $5.7 million budget. The move brings the department’s paid staff nearly to parity with its volunteer force, a shift from having just one part-time paid firefighter previously.

Brazill and Grevelding said no single incident prompted the decision, but the department, which handles about 15 calls a week, was regularly missing calls during the day when most volunteers are at other jobs, requiring neighboring departments to respond in their place. “Even the volunteers were asking for help,” Brazill said. “They don’t want to miss calls. We were probably missing a handful of calls every week.”

The 20 new hires — 18 men and two women — will earn $27 an hour without health benefits, working four-hour daytime shifts from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., up to 20 hours a week. None are current Minoa volunteers, but all have at least five years of firefighting experience, and many already hold full-time firefighting jobs elsewhere. The village also hired Auggie Matt as a part-time paid chief overseeing the daytime staff, at a salary of about $34,000; Grevelding will continue as part-time chief for about $37,000 annually while also working full time at a 911 center. “We aren’t replacing our volunteers,” Grevelding said. “We are supplementing them.”

Minoa’s fire department, which formed in 1913, covers not only the village’s 1.2 square miles but also the northern part of the town of Manlius under a contract that brings in about $1.8 million annually from Manlius taxpayers, an area totaling 33 square miles and about 11,000 residents. Brazill said the village can absorb the added costs without raising taxes in Minoa or charging Manlius taxpayers more.

The staffing shortage reflects a broader trend: the number of volunteer firefighters in New York has dropped by about a third over a generation, from about 120,000 in the early 2000s to about 80,000 today, according to the Firefighters Association of the State of New York. Minoa is one of several Upstate New York municipalities, including DeWitt, Liverpool, North Syracuse, Clay and Camillus, that have added paid staff in recent years; neighboring East Syracuse recently hired 10 part-time firefighters at $25 an hour.

Minoa is also part of ongoing discussions with the villages of Manlius and Fayetteville about a possible town-wide fire department merger, an idea previously studied and abandoned in 2012. Lisa Parshall, a political science professor at Daemen College who has researched municipal consolidation in New York, said mergers can offer long-term efficiencies but are often difficult for communities to accept. “Merging is almost always traumatic for communities,” she said. Brazill said the villages are holding monthly meetings but have not yet determined potential costs, which he said would need to be resolved before any public discussion of a merger.