Copper Canyon Fire and Medical District Chief Danny Johnson delivered an update on CCFMD’s current operations during the Camp Verde Town Council meeting on Wednesday, May 1.
Johnson is also the fire chief for the Verde Valley Fire District and now serves in a dual leadership role with both agencies through an intergovernmental agreement approved by both boards last August.
Johnson explained that the CCFMD board now has five board members, while the district has 48 full-time firefighters and four administrative personnel. During fiscal year 2023, the district responded to 4,165 calls for service, an average of 11 per day, about 2,100 of which were for medical transport. Call volume has been increasing by about 100 calls per year, except for 2021, when there were about 500 additional calls.
CCFMD provides fire suppression, EMS, swift water team, wildland fire and HAZMAT services. Johnson said that their HAZMAT team is one of the only HAZMAT teams in northern Arizona and that it has been difficult to keep the team intact given their limited funding.
With regard to the district’s budget, Johnson said that his goal for it was to keep it balanced and avoid raising taxes. He added that when he was brought in as chief, the initial plan was to max out the tax rate, which was something that he did not want to do.
The projected balanced budget for FY25, pending approval, is $8,924,110. Sixty percent of the district’s funding is expected to come from property tax and another 22% from revenue from ambulance transport. The majority of costs in the budget are for personnel, which account for 63% of the total. Johnson said that the item most concerning to him was the district’s debt service, which requires about 18% of the budget. CCFMD pays around $1.6 million a year for leases and on loans.
“What we are challenged with as a district is there is no money in the bank,” Johnson said. “There are no savings. What we are basically doing is having to rebuild this district from the ground up, but we are balanced. We have a balanced budget.”
Johnson went on to discuss the effects of Proposition 117, a voter initiative passed in 2012 that he said changed the trajectory of fire districts in Arizona.
Following the 2008 recession, Johnson said, most fire districts had their budgets cut by 60%, which limited how quickly districts could grow, and they can now only grow by 5% annually.
The district’s debt peaked in September at $2.3 million due to a $856,000 accounting error resulting from the merger of the Camp Verde Fire District and the Montezuma Rimrock Fire District, compounded by the construction of a $3.5 million Cherry Creek fire station.
Another issue that Johnson said he regards as a challenge is new growth in mobile home parks, specifically issues with how parcels are laid out and taxed. As an example, he described one mobile home park parcel that is divided into 164 lots.
The district taxes the one parcel a total of around $10,000 annually, but if CCFMD taxed the individual homes at an average of $300 annually based on a 1,000-square-foot home, then it could be receiving around $49,000. Johnson argued that those 164 parcels cause call volumes to go up because those residents need services, but that providing those services hurts the district because the mobile home residents are getting the same level of service as homeowners at a very reduced rate compared to what individual homeowners pay.
He added that while the Verde Valley sees about 3 million visitors per year, the district gets no funding from tourism but nevertheless has to respond to all of the tourists’ calls, and that while new growth will help the district, over the next five to seven years, it will only bring the district up to the funding level it should have today.
The VVFD and CCFMD boards are considering splitting a financial feasibility study on fire authority to see what one fire authority for a whole region would look like in terms of efficiencies and cost savings. If approved, it may start in July.
The districts in the region are also trying to reduce redundancies among the small fire districts. VVFD, CCFMD and the Sedona Fire District already entered into an intergovernmental agreement for community risk reduction.
“We need every fire district in this region to be healthy because none of us are big enough to do it on our own,” Johnson said, adding that he wants to keep building relationships within the region’s districts.
