Private Equity Finds a New Source of Profit: Volunteer Fire Departments

[dalton99a]

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/14/us/fire-department-software-private-equity.html

https://archive.ph/p7B8l

Private Equity Finds a New Source of Profit: Volunteer Fire Departments
Rural departments have long relied on cheap software solutions to keep their operations running. But fire chiefs report sharp price increases as investors have entered the market.
By Mike Baker
Dec. 14, 2025, 5:01 a.m. ET

The Norfolk Volunteer Fire Department operates on an annual budget of $132,000, barely enough to sustain its aging rigs, train unpaid crews and keep the lights on at the station in the hills of northern Connecticut.

Not long ago, it faced a different kind of emergency: The software system it relied on to track detailed incident information was no longer going to be usable. A company backed by private equity investors, ESO Solutions, had acquired the platform and planned to shut it down. The alternative software it was offering would raise the community’s costs from $795 per year to more than $5,000.

Urgently looking for an alternative, the department found a cheaper system, but then ESO bought up the other brand. It left the department in a bind. “We don’t have a big tax base,” said Matthew Ludwig, an assistant fire chief in Norfolk. “We have to watch our pennies.”

Much of the software used by firefighters and other emergency responders was initially created by people who worked in those fields and felt a calling to keep prices affordable. But now fire chiefs around the country are scrambling to manage shrinking options and soaring costs as corporations flush with cash from Wall Street have raced to dominate the market.

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[sop]

1. Private Equity investors today were the Robber Barons in the Gilded Age.

[CousinIT]

2. Private equity destroys every economic sector or industry it touches.

Now it's destroying Social Security - the most effective and efficient anti-poverty program in the government.

Frank Bisignano, other PE goons from Musk-world are disemboweling it in preparation for privatization, after which it will cost 15x more to run, and it will be a much less effective anti-poverty program.

[Bettie]

3. Our town has a volunteer fire department

need to tell my DH this, since he's now on the city council by accident.

No one was running in our precinct, so we wrote his name in.

We joked on the way back that if he could win with two votes, well, that would be funny.

Well, a bunch of people got two write-in votes so the city draws a name at that point. It was him. Go figure.

And we're not even "From here"...we moved here in early 2002, so only 23 years. Being "from here" means that your grandparents graduated from the high school. The family trees are kind of...circular in some cases.

[Deminpenn]

4. VFDs are obsolete

Their biggest problem is they aren't getting younger volunteers as current volunteers age.

Firefighters should be paid professionals and costs if equipment shared by a regional tax base.

My hometown has an annual Xmas parade. The biggest contingent is always the local VFD trucks.
Within a 2 mile radius of where I live there are 3 VFDs and 1 paid, professional FD. Go another mile or so and there are another 3 VFDs. They are all trying to raise money from the same population base. It would be so much more efficient to have either a county FD or perhaps 2 regional FDs organized around the county's 2 paid, professional FDs.

[lostnfound]

6. I think that's irrelevant; taxpayers will end up paying for software either way. Nt

[WhiskeyGrinder]

8. Depends on the area. Our VFD has to turn people away.

[KT2000]

5. Cannibalism

we are there now.

[sakabatou]

7. Private equity groups are vampires