Guilford County officials have discovered a major mistake that has left fire departments across the county in a big bind: The departments, which are already struggling financially, do not have $2.3 million in funding that those departments were counting on from Guilford County.

The departments across the county already operate on very thin margins, so the newly discovered deficit could mean some departments are unable to fund planned expenses or buy needed new equipment the firefighters were counting on.

The shortfall affects larger departments more than small ones, and the funding will need to be made up somehow.

  It could mean higher fire district taxes in the upcoming 2025-2026 Guilford County fiscal budget, or it could mean the county dipping further into its already dwindling savings account, or it could mean that some county fire departments have to do without some things they had planned on and budgeted for.

One county leader who’s very concerned about the upsetting news is Guilford County Commissioner Alan Perdue – whose first full-time job was working in emergency services and who later worked his way up to becoming a longtime director of Emergency Services for Guilford County.  He later retired and was elected to the Board of Commissioners.

“The amount of revenue projected for several fire department budgets, based on information in the past, came up short,” Perdue said this week.

Perdue added one contributing factor may have been that the model for fire department expenses and revenues has changed a great deal in the last decade or two.

“The old funding model used to work,” Perdue said.  “That was largely based on having volunteers, but now it’s just not sufficient.”

He added that, not just in Guilford County, but across the nation, fire departments don’t see anywhere near the number of volunteer firefighters they once did; now the departments must rely almost solely on paid employees, which has dramatically increased the cost of running a fire department.

The former Emergency Services director said that, given the current thin operating margins of fire departments in Guilford County, and the rising cost of vehicles and other equipment, this amount of lost funding will have a “significant” impact  on departments – “on some more than others.”

While no county official wanted to blame anyone or any department for the mistake, the size of the shortfall suggests that it was at least in part human error rather than simply economic circumstances taking a very drastic turn in a direction other than what was expected.  When county officials make revenue projections for budgeting purposes, they always try to overshoot the mark, rather than undershoot it, because it’s a whole lot better to have some money left over after payments at the end of the fiscal year than it is to come up short and have no money to cover expenses.

Everyone, including government workers, can make an error in a mathematical calculation from time to time.

As for the near total loss of the volunteer firefighters that county fire departments relied on years ago, there are a lot of contributing factors to that trend.  One is that people seem to have less time to devote to volunteer activities.

“It’s all over,” Perdue said. “It’s nationwide – people are busy with their families or they may be part of other social groups as well that take up their time.”

The poor economy also likely doesn’t help since many people have to work two jobs and they may not have the time to dedicate to volunteer to firefighting efforts.

Another possibility is that Americans in 2025 simply don’t have the same sense of duty to community service that citizens had 50 years ago.

Chairman of the Guilford County Board of Commissioners Skip Alston said the $2.3 million gap has to be addressed and said he had been meeting with other county officials on the matter and solutions were being sought.

“The fire departments do need additional funding,” Alston said, adding that there could be fire district tax rate increases in the upcoming budget.  County fire departments might have to do some tightening, or it might take some combination of the two.

One high-ranking county official who asked not to be identified said he thought that, since the fire departments were told by the county that they would have the money, and those departments budgeted accordingly, Guilford County should be the party responsible for finding the funds and making up the difference, holding the fire departments harmless for the mistake.

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