Why it matters
Most American towns build a fire department as one of their first acts of self-government. Scottsdale hired one. Rural/Metro began in 1948 as a single fire engine and a subscription list that a newspaper reporter, Lou Witzeman, sold door to door on the unincorporated desert. When the town incorporated in 1951, it signed a contract with his company that December. The arrangement lasted until midnight on July 1, 2005, and for most of those years Scottsdale was the country’s best-known example of a city that bought its fire protection from a private company.
The fire department you’d expect is not the most important thing it left behind. Witzeman’s company used Scottsdale as a laboratory. It set test fires in new model homes, then wrote the law: on June 4, 1985, the City Council passed Rural/Metro’s sprinkler ordinance 6–1, and every home permitted in Scottsdale from January 1, 1986 had to have fire sprinklers. Fifteen years later 41,408 homes, more than half the city’s, were sprinklered, and nobody had died in a fire in one of them. Thirteen people had died in fires in homes without sprinklers.
Where to find it today
Not in Scottsdale. The city has run its own fire department since 2005. The fire company is still in business, owned since 2024 by an Alabama firm and selling subscription fire protection where Witzeman started, in unincorporated areas. The ambulance side is part of American Medical Response. In Scottsdale the legacy is overhead: the sprinkler heads in the ceilings of houses built since 1986. The first fire hall, at Brown Avenue and Second Street, also housed the town’s offices from January 1952.
How it started
In 1948 the desert east of Phoenix had farms, a few resorts and a growing scatter of houses, and no fire protection at all. City departments stopped at city limits. Scottsdale was not yet a town, so there was no government to ask. Witzeman, a newspaper reporter, watched a house near his home just outside Phoenix burn while no one came. His response was to buy a fire engine and go door to door selling annual memberships “in lieu of taxes.” Subscribers got the truck. (Today non-subscribers who need it get a bill afterward; how the company handled them in 1948 is not recorded.) The company began as the Rural Fire Department and later took the name Rural/Metro.
The model was a business, not a charity and not a government, and that set everything that followed. When the Town of Scottsdale incorporated in June 1951, it had to find a manager, a clerk, police and fire protection before it could think about anything else. In December it signed its first fire contract with the Rural Fire Company, for $4,260 a year. The city’s own historians later wrote that this let the town avoid “having to hire firefighters as town employees” and “set a precedent for Scottsdale’s innovative use of public-private partnerships.” The partnership started literally. In January 1952 the town’s offices moved into the “town hall” inside the company’s new fire hall at Brown and Second.
The decisions that locked it in
Subscription, 1948. A volunteer company or a resident-organized fire district would have been the conventional answer. Witzeman’s choice to charge customers is still Rural/Metro’s business model seventy-eight years later.
The contract, 1951. The new town could have hired firefighters. It hired a company. That one decision explains the next fifty-four years, including the end.
Prevention as a business strategy, 1974. In the early 1970s Witzeman decided a smaller, better-trained force could protect a growing city if buildings did more of the work. In September 1974 the city adopted Ordinance 829, requiring sprinklers in commercial buildings over 7,500 square feet and in taller hotels and apartments. For a contractor paid to cover a fast-growing city, fewer big fires meant fewer stations to staff.
The house tests, 1982, and the law, 1985. In 1977 Witzeman went to San Clemente, California, to support its chief, Ronny Coleman, as a residential sprinkler ordinance was presented there, and came home and gave the job of writing one for Scottsdale to fire marshal Bob Edwards. Until then, residential sprinklers had been tested only in laboratories or in buildings scheduled for demolition. During the week of April 19, 1982, Rural/Metro set nine fires in two Womack Homes model houses, having guaranteed the builder that it would buy either house at full market value if it was destroyed. More than 250 people took part in the three days of testing. The sprinklered losses came to $17,200, against an estimated $116,000 without sprinklers. Edwards, by then chief, presented the ordinance on June 4, 1985. Testimony ran four and a half hours, and it passed 6–1 under Mayor Herb Drinkwater.
Going national, 1980s–1993. The company moved into ambulance service in the 1980s and took its parent public on NASDAQ in 1993. By 1997 it reported operations in more than 150 communities in 18 states. The Scottsdale contract was now one line in a national portfolio, and in 2003 the company decided that line wasn’t worth keeping.
The years it nearly ended
The record is silent on the early years. Whatever it cost a reporter to keep a fire engine running on subscriptions between 1948 and 1951, nobody wrote it down, or nobody we found did. What is documented is the rescue: in December 1951 the new town became a paying customer, and the company never again had to live on door-to-door sales alone.
The crises that are documented came after the company outgrew Scottsdale. In 2003 Rural/Metro announced it would leave the city it had protected since incorporation, even though voters had backed keeping the private contract that May. Our July 1, 2005 page tells the handover. The city hired and equipped a department in nineteen months, mostly from the crews already in the stations, and at midnight the shirts changed. Then the parent company was bought by Warburg Pincus for $438 million in 2011, filed for Chapter 11 in 2013 after missing an interest payment, merged into American Medical Response in 2015, and in 2024 the fire business was sold off to Solomon Safety Group in Alabama. The company that started on the Scottsdale desert survived as two companies, and neither is based here.
What it set out to do, and what it does now
Witzeman set out to sell fire protection to people who had none. Today Rural Metro Fire does essentially the same thing: subscriptions to homes and businesses in unincorporated areas, plus contracts with towns, fire districts, airports and industrial sites, with non-subscribers billed after a call. In a sense the fire company has come back to 1948.
In between it expanded well past that purpose. It added ambulances, a stock listing and a national footprint, and it took on a role nobody had asked a fire contractor to play: writing a city’s building code. That expansion followed the money. A company paid to cover a growing city had every reason to make houses that would not burn. The 1985 ordinance served the public well, and it served the company’s costs well too. The 1997 study is frank that the ordinance was expected to eliminate or shrink “at least three fire stations,” saving $6 million up front and more than $1 million a year. The homebuilders got trade-offs in return: 28-foot streets instead of 32, cul-de-sacs up to 2,000 feet long instead of 600, hydrants up to 1,200 feet apart instead of 600, and water mains a size smaller.
Who the record leaves out
The firefighters. The documents name the founder, the chiefs and the fire marshal. They don’t name the people on the trucks: who rode the first engine in 1948, what Rural/Metro crews were paid compared with municipal firefighters in Phoenix, or how it felt in 2003 to learn your employer was leaving the city you served. The 2005 transition is told as an institutional handoff. For the crews it was a change of employer, and that story is unrecorded.
The non-subscribers. A subscription fire service has a hard edge built into it: the company’s practice today is to send the truck to a house that hasn’t paid and bill the owner afterward. Whether and how often that happened in Scottsdale before 1951, and to whom, is not in any record we found.
The one vote against. The 1985 ordinance passed 6–1 after hours of testimony “on both sides of the issue.” The company’s report quotes the supporters and doesn’t name the dissenter or say what the opponents argued. The council minutes at the City Clerk’s office would.
What it didn’t have to become
Rural/Metro didn’t have to become the author of Scottsdale’s building code. A contract fire company could have simply answered calls and billed the city for engines. Instead, Witzeman’s people decided the cheapest fire was the one that never grew, and they used the leverage of being the whole fire department to change how the city built. The result is the most consequential public-safety law in Scottsdale’s history, and a private company wrote it.
And Scottsdale didn’t have to stay private for 57 years. At any point the city could have built its own department. It didn’t, because the contract was cheaper and the results were good. When the arrangement ended, the company made the decision, not the voters, who had just endorsed it. A partnership that began with the town keeping its offices in its fire company’s hall ended with the company deciding it no longer needed the town.