Minoa, N.Y. – When Donald Grevelding joined the Minoa Fire Department 38 years ago, the village had about 80 volunteer firefighters.

Today, that’s dwindled to about 30. And only about 18 or 19 regularly respond.

So the village took a bold step this summer: It hired 20 part-time firefighters.

With little public debate and a unanimous village board vote, the department went from one, part-time paid firefighter – Grevelding – to having almost as many paid firefighters as volunteers. The change added more than half a million dollars to the village’s $5.7 million budget.

Minoa’s firefighting challenges are universal to places across Upstate New York and nationwide, where rural and suburban communities rely on volunteers to bolster and sometimes answer all emergency calls.

As volunteer ranks have shrunk, more departments over the years have added paid staff, including in DeWitt, Liverpool, North Syracuse, Clay and Camillus. Minoa’s neighbor, the village of East Syracuse, recently hired 10 part-time firefighters at $25 an hour to shore up its staff.

Minoa’s decision to hire so many at once stands out as a stark sign that the status quo there no longer works.

Both Grevelding and Mayor William Brazill said no single emergency prompted the decision to staff up the department, which gets about 15 calls a week.

But the village department was missing some calls, both said, especially during the day when most volunteers are working other jobs. That meant other nearby departments had to respond in their place.

“Even the volunteers were asking for help,” Brazill said. “They don’t want to miss calls. We were probably missing a handful of calls every week.”

Minoa, one of three villages inside the town of Manlius, is in the midst of talks about creating a town-wide department. They’ve considered this before. Starting in 2008, the villages of Manlius, Fayetteville and Minoa spent months studying a merger. In 2012, the idea was abandoned, and instead the villages began to purchase equipment together and share some services.

Brazill was a part of those talks when he was a deputy mayor. Today, there is a renewed effort to see if it would make sense ,in part due to the shrinking pool of volunteers but also to see if it would save money or even improve response times.

At the same time, Brazill, who remains hesitant but open to a merger as a longer-term solution, said his village’s department couldn’t wait.

The fire chief agreed.

“We recognized the lapse in coverage and acted quickly,” Grevelding said. “Our dedicated volunteers wanted this and asked us for assistance.”

A bigger firefighting bill

Minoa’s volunteer fire department first formed in 1913. It’s part of the village’s $5.7 million budget. Even before the new hires, the fire department accounted for about one-third of that budget.

Those new firefighters are going to cost an extra $560,000 a year. That means the fire department’s budget, which includes ambulance services, is nearly $2.3 million – or 40% of the village budget.

But the village’s 3,600 residents have help when it comes to paying that firefighting bill.

That’s because the department contracts with the town of Manlius to cover a much larger area that goes beyond the village’s 1.2 square miles.

Minoa firefighters actually cover the village plus the northern part of the town, an area that’s 33 square miles and has about 11,000 residents.

In return, Manlius town taxpayers send about $1.8 million to Minoa each year for that coverage.

Minoa’s new, paid firefighters will continue to provide coverage for that larger area.

And Brazill says the village can handle the extra costs without raising taxes in Minoa or charging Manlius taxpayers more.

A part of something new

When a 911 call comes into the Minoa department, at least four firefighters must respond before a truck or engine can leave the station.

And answering those calls regularly goes beyond the generosity of helping people. It’s part of the village’s obligation to provide coverage for the northern part of Manlius, Grevelding said.

Finding those four volunteers to answer each call has become tougher during daytime hours, the chief said.

“Most families in Minoa today have both mom and dad working at least one job, and some are working more than one job to get by,” Grevelding said. “Before, mom stayed home and took care of the kids and dad worked during the day. After dinner dad had time to volunteer in the fire department.”

Now, there’s no time to do that, he said.

The challenge goes far beyond Minoa. The number of volunteer firefighters in New York has dropped by about a third over a generation. Volunteer ranks went from about 120,000 in the early 2000s to about 80,000 now, according to the Firefighters Association of the State of New York.

The village board first began talking almost two years ago about hiring firefighters. In late July, the board voted 5-0 to hire 20 part-time firefighters, 18 men and two women. They’ll earn $27 an hour, with no health benefits.

None of the new hires are current Minoa volunteers. But they all have at least five years of firefighting experience. Many already have fulltime firefighting jobs.

The plan is to have the paid firefighters work four-hour shifts during the day, from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., up to 20 hours a week.

“They all told me they wanted to be on the ground floor and be part of something new,” Brazill said. “It was really refreshing.”

The village also hired Auggie Matt as part-time paid chief to oversee the daytime, paid staff. Matt’s salary is about $34,000. Grevelding has a full-time job at the 911 center but will still serve as part-time chief for about $37,000 annually.

Volunteers will continue to respond, too, Grevelding said.

“We aren’t replacing our volunteers,” he said. “We are supplementing them.”

Other options: A merger?

A common solution to shrinking volunteer ranks is to hire paid staff, said Lisa Parshall, who published a Rockefeller Institute of Government report on consolidation in New York in 2022.

“They are just really hurting for people,” said Parshall, who teaches political science at Daemen College in Amherst and specializes in municipal reorganization. “We are at an all-time low. It hits the hardest in smaller, more rural communities.”

But the better and longer-term solution, she said, is to consider mergers and consolidation. That way, services, costs and equipment can be shared, which is more efficient.

Two departments in the northern suburbs did that in 2014. The Baldwinsville and Lysander fire departments merged, creating the North West Fire District. It covers about 52 square miles, including Baldwinsville and large portions of the towns of Lysander and Van Buren. It remains all volunteer, covering about 19,500 people with five stations.

Those larger districts can better serve modern communities, and the cost of paid staff can be spread across a larger tax base, she said. If you were designing an efficient fire department system based on where people live, many fire stations wouldn’t exist where they are today.

But merging is hard, she added, because it can mean letting go of history and traditions for some departments. “Merging is almost always traumatic for communities,” she said.

The three fire departments in Manlius, once again, are studying that. So far, they have had monthly meetings over the summer and are just talking about how it would work.

Brazill, who has been part of the meetings, said before they make any decisions or involve the public, the cost to taxpayers has to be figured out. If it’s even more expensive, he said, the public will likely balk.

‘An open mind’

Brazill first moved to Minoa from Syracuse when he was 8 years old. He served as Minoa village justice for 10 years and then was elected as a village trustee in 2002. Two years later, he became deputy mayor and then, a decade ago, he became mayor. He retired in 2022 as a sales rep for United Rentals.

Now Brazill, 67, is also the president of the state’s Conference of Mayors, an association made up of leaders from villages and cities. Both Mayor RuthAnn Loveless of Hamilton, the home to Colgate University, and New York City’s Mayor Zorhan Mamdani serve on the executive committee alongside Brazill.

The conference aims to help mayors better govern and share best practices, in addition to lobbying Albany and Washington for more support.

As president, Brazill has shared his fire department lessons. He hosted a question-and-answer session recently with other NYCOM members about his village’s decision to hire paid firefighters.

Brazill is worried that a town wide Manlius fire department could drive up the tax rate. His preference is to keep the local village fire department, but he says he has an open mind if it makes sense.

But he’s also a realist and not afraid to make long-lasting decisions when they make financial sense.

Five years ago, he and the board changed how Minoa’s fire department selects its leaders. Firefighters used to pick their own leaders. Now, the elected members of the village board hires fire department staff.

And in March 2025 Brazill and the board closed the very village court that he presided over for a decade. In that final decision, finances trumped any emotional ties. The court had lost money for six years, meaning village taxpayers had to pick up the extra costs.

“The last thing I want to do is demolish any service the village provides,” he said at the time. “But there’s no defense anymore.”

He may face a similar decision with the fire department, down the road.

“I don’t want to lose any department we have,” he said this summer. “But I’m looking at it with an open mind.”

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