Woodbury wants to expand its Fire Department, but applicants are in short supply

In Woodbury, Assistant Public Safety Director Chris Klein is trying to expand the Fire Department to keep up with residents’ needs in the fast-growing east metro suburb. He was hoping to fill 37 or 38 part-time positions, but after recruitment, the city filled just 17.

The shortage of part-time firefighters has become so acute in Woodbury that the city plans to adjust the schedule for full-time firefighters to make up the difference, adding some 700 hours to each full-time firefighter’s annual schedule.

It’s a frustrating place to be for any fire department, a field that for years attracted a lot more applicants than it had openings. But in recent years, departments have seen a steep drop-off in fresh faces coming through the door.

“If you would have told me that 23 years ago when I started I would have said, ‘No way,’” Klein said.

The larger departments like St. Paul have seen a big drop in applicants as well, said St. Paul Deputy Fire Chief Jamie Smith.

“We really noticed a big, big drop-off since COVID-19,” he said. The city still has enough people coming in for full-time firefighter vacancies to fill the 450-strong department, he added. The city doesn’t have any part-time positions, so they haven’t seen the same kind of shortage other departments in the Twin Cities metro area have faced.

Hiring and retention of part-time firefighters continues to plague public safety departments across the region, said DeeDee Jankovich, executive director of the Minnesota State Fire Department Association. Finding volunteer firefighters — a catch-all term that applies to anyone who’s not full time, whether they’re paid or unpaid, on-call or scheduled for a part-time shift — became such a problem that Jankovich helped the association apply for a national grant to find a solution.

The $1.4 million SAFER grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency has paid for marketing materials like tents, posters and brochures as well as social media training to help fire chiefs across the state more effectively promote their departments to a younger audience, said Jerry Streich, the person who steers the SAFER grant for the State Fire Department Association.

Some part-time jobs are hard to fill because the pay is low at less than $20 an hour, Streich said. Firefighting has also become a lot busier than it was a generation or two ago, when a fire department responded strictly to fires, he said. Today, a fire department gets called out for a wide variety of emergencies, from medical calls to search and rescue to active shooters, Streich said. He worked for 32 years as a firefighter, retiring as the fire chief in Andover, and saw the shift take place after the Sept. 11 attack.

“We’ve evolved into the Swiss-Army knife of emergency response,” he said. That can be intimidating to someone who’s only working part time without as much training as a full-time firefighter; it’s also hard to find all the right equipment for a part-time staffer, he said.

Even the promise of a pension hasn’t been enough to raise more interest in part-time firefighting, Streich said. The state of Minnesota allows part-time firefighters to participate in the state’s largest pension plan, the one offered by the Public Employees Retirement Association.

Fire chiefs aren’t taught to use marketing, Streich said, but a bit of public relations can help fire departments, especially those in smaller, more rural communities, find the people they need, he said.

“We have to use the new techniques in marketing to get on people’s flat screens,” he said. It’s a call to public service, more than anything, said Streich. “We have to inspire them to come serve.”

In the West Metro Fire-Rescue District covering New Hope and Crystal, it hasn’t been too hard to find new applicants, said Chief Sarah Larson. The problem has been keeping them.

“I don’t know if it’s because people are more transient, but they just don’t stay at things as long,” she said. The job requires at least 10 hours a week, and being on call from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. during the week and for 24 hours a day during the weekend. Employees are expected to make 30% of the calls to their assigned station. The West Metro Fire-Rescue District will have more applications available at an informational barbecue at 6 p.m. on Aug. 28 at its station at 4251 Xylon Ave. N., New Hope.

It can be a big commitment, Larson said, but becoming a paid on-call firefighter brings a lot of benefits, too.

“It’s a fabulous life experience for anybody that chooses to do it and I highly recommend it,” she said.