Cost of living pushing some first responders out of their job in rural Arizona

PRESCOTT, AZ (3TV/CBS 5) — Finding affordable housing in Arizona has become a challenge, especially with higher interest rates due to inflation, and it’s also having a big impact on first responders in our state. In some rural communities like Prescott, fire departments are having a hard time filling positions and keeping them because of expensive housing options.

So now, researchers at Northern Arizona University are working with a number of agencies in the state to try and find a solution. Scott Freitag is the fire chief with the Central Arizona Fire and Medical Authority, or CAFMA. They serve more than 100,000 people across Yavapai County. “Yavapai College did a study and looked at housing costs within our region,” Freitag said. “The median home price they came up with was $672,000 and it would take $165,000 a year salary to get into the housing market,” Freitag said. “When you have a new firefighter that starts at $54-55,000 per year, they really don’t make enough to get into the market.”

Freitag says there are insufficient affordable housing or rental options, specifically near the Prescott area. That’s now impacting his staffing. “We had a person leave after 18 months, a person leave nine months into the academy,” he said. “We just did a recruitment and a hiring process and I needed to hire 12. I was only able to hire 10. We are just not getting the numbers we need of people applying in our area.”

He says about half of his recent hires live in the Valley and commute, but in the past, some find that isn’t worth it. “If we hire someone that can’t live in our area, it doesn’t take them long to find another position as a firefighter down in the Valley,” Freitag said.

It is a problem researchers at NAU are trying to solve. The first Regents’ Community Grant for $800,000 was approved earlier this year for a nine-month study gathering and analyzing data regarding the retention and recruitment of Arizona’s public police and fire personnel across the state. The budget request for $57,560 from Regents’ Community Grants will include personnel salary, graduate assistant salary, travel expenses, data subscription and software, and more.

The team will work with CAFMA, Prescott Fire, real estate developers and local leaders to look into housing solutions to find and keep first responders. Fred DuVal is the chairman. “It costs local communities about $100,000 to train a new fireman and that’s a staggering amount of money,” he said.

DuVal says smaller, rural communities are spending that money to train new recruits, only for some of them to then leave the department. Freitag says other states like Nevada have housing assistance for first responders. He is hopeful this research will bring a workable solution. “My hope is in the end, we can come up with a housing project or some sort of grant funding to help folks get into housing and if it takes some sort of legislative change, that the information and data we get back from NAU will help us when we go to the Legislature and go to our elected officials and say here is the problem. Here’s (sic) some ideas for solutions and through the legislative process can we get some changes that will help us,” he said.

DuVal said salary could also be looked into. “What we hope to do is free up more dollars from these rural fire departments for salaries that come from their training costs, so that the costs are not consumed by the training, and they are instead allocated to salaries and other tools of retention. By finding ways to lower the cost of housing, firefighters can get trained and make life and career decisions to stay in rural Arizona, where they are so badly needed,” DuVal said.

The team of researchers will meet at least once a month throughout the next year. The CAFMA fire chief also said because of the staffing shortage, current employees have mandatory overtime shifts, which he says can become tiring and is not sustainable for firefighters.

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