Why he matters
In 1948 Scottsdale had a Chamber of Commerce, a school board and no fire department, because legally there was no town. Lou Witzeman found that out the hard way, watching a neighbor’s house burn with no one to call. His answer was Rural Metro, a private fire department that households paid for by subscription. It was a very Scottsdale solution: no government available, so a businessman sold fire protection.
What makes him matter is how long the solution lasted. When Scottsdale incorporated in 1951, it kept the contract. For the next half-century the city was the largest in America without its own fire department, the national showcase for privatized fire service, and proud of it. The arrangement he started did not end until the city’s department took over at midnight on July 1, 2005.
Where to find his mark today
In the history, mostly. There is no Witzeman street or park. His story runs through the 1940s chapter, the 1948 page and the day the city fire department took over.
The town that had no one to call
The ranches-and-war era ended with a town assembling the organs of a real place while remaining, on paper, nobody’s responsibility. The Chamber of Commerce incorporated in 1947. Rural Metro and James H. Boyd’s Scottsdale Progress both arrived in 1948. By 1950 the census counted 2,032 people, and fire protection came from Witzeman’s brigade while nearly everything else came from the county and the school board. That could not last, and on July 2, 1951, it did not: Scottsdale became a legal town, and kept Rural Metro.
The full story
The record on Lou Witzeman is short and centers on one decision. In 1948, with no fire department in the unincorporated town, he watched a neighbor’s home burn and organized a private subscription brigade. The company became Rural Metro. The local record does not keep his birth or death years or how long he ran the company himself.
The brigade worked well enough that incorporation in 1951 did not replace it. The new town kept the contract, and so did the city it became. Economists studied the arrangement and almost nobody copied it. The contract was cheaper than a municipal service, response times were good, and the boosters liked the frontier flavor.
The end came on the company’s schedule, not the city’s. In May 2003 voters backed continuing the private contract. On November 13, 2003, Rural/Metro announced it would end service anyway, citing the cost of protecting 220,000 residents and seven million annual visitors on the terms Scottsdale would pay. The city had nineteen months to build a fire department from scratch, largely from the Rural/Metro crews already in the stations. At midnight on July 1, 2005, firefighters at every station changed shirts and rolled the same trucks from the same bays. Fifty-seven years after one burning house, Scottsdale ran its own fire service for the first time. See the 2000s chapter for the rest of that year.