What it means
Rural/Metro is the company that put out Scottsdale’s fires for 57 years without being part of the government. Say the name to anyone who lived here before 2005 and you will get a story: the trucks, the subscription stickers, the time the engine came anyway. Say it to a newcomer and you will have to explain that a city of 220,000 people, with resorts, an airport and a mountain preserve, contracted its fire department to a private corporation until this century, and that the arrangement ended not because the city wanted out but because the company did.
The site’s profile of Lou Witzeman tells the founder’s story and the July 1, 2005 day page covers the midnight handover. This page is about the name and what it stood for.
Where you’ll meet it
On the Lou Witzeman public safety building. In the 1940s chapter, where the first contract fire service begins with one truck in 1948. In county islands north of the city, where Rural Metro Fire still sells memberships. And in any national debate about privatizing public services, where Scottsdale was Exhibit A for decades.
Where the word came from
The name is a merger, and the company was an accident. In 1948 Lou Witzeman, a reporter for the Arizona Times, watched a neighbor’s house burn in the unincorporated country north of Phoenix. No department would come; nobody was paying for one. Witzeman bought a fire engine and walked door to door asking households to subscribe to a service he called the Rural Fire Protection Company, an annual fee in place of the tax no government was collecting. It was the Valley’s founding habit in miniature: no city, so a businessman sells what a city would provide.
When Scottsdale incorporated in 1951, the new town simply kept the arrangement and signed a contract. The company’s own anniversary history credits it with pioneering contracted municipal fire service and being the first to operate in several communities at once. In 1960 it bought Phoenix’s Metropolitan Fire Department, another private outfit, and the combined operation took the name Rural/Metro Fire Department, which became Rural/Metro Corporation in 1972 as it added ambulances, security patrols and hazardous-materials work. Witzeman retired in 1978 and sold the company to its employees through a stock plan. It went public on NASDAQ in 1993 under the symbol RURL.
Scottsdale, meanwhile, became the case study. For half a century the city was cited in every argument about privatization, and it kept voting for the model: in the spring of 2003 voters backed continuing the private contract. Six months later, on November 13, 2003, Rural/Metro announced it would not renew. The city had nineteen months to recruit, train and equip a department, and at midnight on July 1, 2005, crews at every station changed shirts.
What it is not
Rural/Metro is not a government agency and never was, which is why “Scottsdale Fire Department” in anything dated before 2005 means the company’s Scottsdale division. It is also not gone. The ambulance business passed through American Medical Response and Global Medical Response, and Rural Metro Fire still runs stations.
The fine print
The economics explain both the long run and the ending. In Scottsdale the city paid a contract price and the company supplied the trucks, stations and firefighters, many of them “reserves” who worked other jobs, which kept costs below a unionized municipal department and made the model attractive to a growth-minded council. Outside city limits the subscription model held: households paid a membership, and non-members who had a fire were served and then billed. By the 2000s the company’s finances were strained by its ambulance expansion, and the Scottsdale contract, its oldest and most visible, became one it chose to leave.
The corporate afterlife was rough. Warburg Pincus bought Rural/Metro for $438 million in 2011; the company filed for Chapter 11 in 2013 after missing interest payments; it merged into American Medical Response in 2015 and into Global Medical Response in 2018. In 2024 Solomon Safety Group bought the Rural Metro Fire division, which by its 75th anniversary in 2023 had about 1,400 employees answering roughly 80,000 calls a year across Arizona, Oregon and Tennessee, plus industrial, airport and wildland divisions.
Witzeman died in 2004 at 79, a year before the handover he had argued against. The city named its public safety headquarters for him anyway, and the Historical Society still dates the start of fire protection to his one truck in 1948. Two things the record does not give up: what a 1950s Scottsdale subscription cost, and how many non-subscribers were ever billed. If you find either, the Witzeman papers at the University of Arizona, 1947 to 2004, are where to check.