The short version
For more than half a century Scottsdale bought its fire protection from Rural/Metro, the company Lou Witzeman had started in 1948 with one engine and a subscription list. In 2003 the state’s firefighters’ association and a local committee put two initiatives on the ballot to replace it with a city department. Voters rejected them on May 20, 2003, about 63 percent to 37.
Then the company left. In November 2003 Rural/Metro told the city it would not renew the contract after June 30, 2005, and at midnight on July 1, 2005 Scottsdale’s own fire department took over the stations. The city got the department its voters had just turned down, and largely the same firefighters.
The case for a city department
The push came from the firefighters. In 2002, the Professional Fire Fighters of Arizona told voters, “the delegates to the 2002 convention … voted unanimously to support the creation of a municipal fire department for Scottsdale,” and a committee called Citizens to Protect Scottsdale and Our Fire Fighters circulated the petitions. Proposition 200 would have amended the charter to require “a fire department solely staffed by city employees” within six months, under civil service and “local and national standards” for staffing; Proposition 201 was a matching ordinance.
Their arguments were about coverage and competition. The committee said Rural/Metro “only reaches 52% of Scottsdale in four minutes with only three, and sometimes just two, firefighters on its trucks.” Two members of the council’s own Fire and EMS Advisory Committee concluded “the Rural Metro Corporation was not meeting the needs of our city.” Bob Littlefield, elected to the council a year earlier, wrote that residents “will get more protection per tax dollar spent from a municipal fire department than they do from Rural/Metro,” and that the company was “a monopoly.” The line that recurred in their arguments: “Scottsdale is the largest city in America that doesn’t have a city-run professional fire department.”
The case against
The opponents said the service was good and the change would be expensive. Jim Lane, a member of the council’s fire advisory committee who, by his own later account, co-chaired the campaign against the measures and who would be elected to the council the next year and mayor in 2008, wrote that the firefighters’ plan “will cost an additional 3 million dollars a year to provide the same level of service we already have.” The Know Enough to Vote NO committee: “Nothing will change except, of course, the cost. That will go up.” Opponents cited a consultant, Maximus, hired by the city in 2002, which they said “explicitly recommended against moving to a city-operated fire department at this time.” And the founder spoke for himself: “I founded Rural/Metro 55 years ago,” Witzeman wrote. “A few years later, when Scottsdale city leaders asked me to provide fire protection to their newly incorporated community I welcomed the chance. … Speaking as an individual, not on behalf of the company, as your neighbor I ask you to vote No.”
The vote and the exit
On May 20, 2003 voters rejected Proposition 200, 20,581 to 11,917, and Proposition 201, 20,489 to 11,813, on a turnout of about 29 percent. A trade publication reported that they had “soundly” defeated the measures.
Six months later the company changed the outcome. In November 2003, Rural/Metro’s chief executive, Jack Brucker, announced that the company would end its Scottsdale fire contract in 2005 while continuing to run ambulances. Its next annual report put it plainly: the contract “was first entered into in 1952. We have notified the City of Scottsdale that we elected not to renew the contract effective June 30, 2005.” No statement of its reasons survives online. Twenty years later the city’s fire chief told a commission that “because Rural Metro had a profit business model, over time it became evident that the contract could not be maintained”; Lane blamed the firefighters’ union.
At midnight on July 1, 2005 the announcement came over the alarm system, and the Scottsdale Fire Department took over. About 80 percent of its firefighters had come from Rural/Metro, the department later said. The country’s best-known experiment in contracting out a city’s fire service ended not by a vote but by a notice. The 2000s politics chapter and the Rural/Metro profile carry the longer story.