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Landmark day • Friday, July 1, 2005

July 1, 2005: Scottsdale Fire Department Takes Over

Fifty-seven years after Lou Witzeman started a subscription fire brigade, firefighters at every Scottsdale station change shirts at midnight — and the city runs its own department for the first time.

Illustrated plaque for July 1, 2005 in Scottsdale history JULY 1 2005 THE RESORT METROPOLIS

What happened

At 12:00 a.m. on July 1, 2005, firefighters across Scottsdale swapped Rural/Metro T-shirts for City of Scottsdale Fire Department uniforms as the new municipal department assumed responsibility for a city of 220,000 residents and more than seven million visitors a year. The change followed Rural/Metro's announcement on November 13, 2003 — six months after voters had backed continuing the private contract — that it would end service, leaving the city nineteen months to staff, train, and equip a department from scratch.

Why it matters

Scottsdale had been the national showcase for privatized fire protection since Rural Metro's founding in 1948; its 2005 switch ended that experiment and closed a chapter that began before the town was incorporated. The department also marked the city's coming-of-age as a full-service municipality rather than a booster town that contracted out.

The oldest private fire department in America

Fire protection had been Scottsdale’s odd institution for as long as it had been a town. In 1948, three years before incorporation, Lou Witzeman organized a private subscription brigade to protect the unincorporated village after watching a neighbor’s house burn with no one to call; the company became Rural Metro, and when the town incorporated in 1951 it simply kept the contract. For the next half-century the arrangement was studied by economists and copied by nobody. Scottsdale was the largest city in America without its own fire department, and it was proud of it — the contract was cheaper than a municipal service, the response times were good, and the boosters liked the frontier flavor.

The experiment ended on Rural/Metro’s schedule, not the city’s. In May 2003 voters had backed continuing the private contract. On November 13, 2003, the company announced it would end service anyway, citing the economics of protecting a city of 220,000 residents and seven million annual visitors on the terms Scottsdale was willing to pay. The city had nineteen months to build a fire department from nothing: hire and train several hundred firefighters, most of them the Rural/Metro crews already in the stations, buy or take over the apparatus, and stand up a command structure, all while the contract ran out.

Midnight, July 1

The transition was designed to be invisible to anyone calling 911, and it was. At midnight on July 1, 2005, the crews at every station in the city took off their Rural/Metro shirts and put on the new uniform; the trucks rolled from the same bays to the same calls. The first day was quiet. The City of Scottsdale Fire Department has run the city ever since, and Rural/Metro — which had started here — went on serving unincorporated Arizona and other contract cities without the town that had made it famous.

The switch belongs to the same year as the Hotel Valley Ho’s December reopening, the SkySong agreement, and a special census of 226,395 — the city, at the peak of the boom, upgrading its own institutions. The rest of the year is at 2005, and the decade in the 2000s chapter.