Three days before Lt. Lacy Kelp from the Brown County Volunteer Fire Department gave birth to her now 6-month-old daughter, she responded to call for a fire in the county.
As one of 12 volunteers at the department, she was able to get to the station the quickest. She lives only three minutes away and was off of work from her full-time job as a paramedic.
“That's a problem, but I can't listen to the tones go off and know that no one is responding from our department,” she said.
Kelp’s department is one of six volunteer-run stations in Brown County, many of which are facing a growing strain amid limited staffing and an increase in call volume.
Kelp’s department, based in Nashville, has 12 active volunteers; in the last four years, the volunteer roster has decreased 37 percent, but the call volume has increased 49 percent. That’s in part due to an influx of tourism, as well as the growth of an aging population. According to a presentation Kelp gave at a community meeting this week, in Nashville, which has about 1,270 residents, the median age is 63.2. In the other area Kelp’s department serves, Washington Township, there are aboVolut 5,200 residents with a median age of 51.9.
“With that, naturally comes increased usage of medical services,” she said.
Because volunteers at Kelp’s department have full-time jobs outside the county and can’t always respond to a call, and many live a 25-minute drive away from the station and can’t respond quickly, in 2025, they missed 410 out of 994 calls received, or about 42 percent.
“Fire doubles every 30 to 60 seconds,” Kelp said. “And in this lightweight new construction that we're seeing these days, think about how long 20 minutes just to get to the station before you get an apparatus going, and if we're lucky, we'll have one or two people.”
Where do “missed” calls go?
When Kelp’s department isn’t able to respond to a call, dispatch forwards those calls to the Hamblen Township Volunteer Fire Department or Fruitdale Volunteer Fire Department. Both are in northern Brown County. That’s in part where the uptick in calls comes from.
The Brown County department where Kelp works serves the Town of Nashville and Washington Township for a total of 102 square miles. The volunteer fire department in Van Buren Township covers about 87 square miles, and the Hamblen Volunteer Fire Department covers 73 square miles. In Jackson Township, the Jackson Township Volunteer Fire Department and Fruitdale Volunteer Fire Department split 62 square miles.
Hamblen Fire Chief David Frensemeier used to get an average of 300 calls a year. Last year, his department answered about 500 calls for service. Similarly, Fire Chief Chris Ainsworth of the Fruitdale Fire Department used to respond to just under 400 calls a year. Now, they’re getting 150 more calls a year; they responded to 533 calls last year.
While both do their best to respond to all calls, they say it’s sometimes challenging when their employees are all volunteers. Last year, Hamblen and Fruitdale responded to 96 percent and 90 percent of their calls, respectively.
It’s getting harder for these departments to recruit volunteers due to the lack of pay, people being occupied with their full-time jobs and limited job and housing availability. The six months-to-a-year it takes to train a volunteer is also a barrier, Ainsworth said.
Most of the volunteers at the Hamblen Fire Department are older than 40. Frensemeier said even if they can’t directly fight a fire, he’ll find other ways for them to help.
“Brown County has become more of a retirement community,” Frensemeier said. “Property values are up. The younger generation can't really afford to stay here and purchase their first homes here. There's no really good jobs to be able to stay here in the county. So, it's taking away from our pool of volunteers.”
Frensemeier tries to recruit volunteers on Facebook. There are normally one to two people on call at a time that can respond to an emergency; most of them live 5 to 10 miles away from the station. It takes about 15 to 30 minutes to respond to a call.
Many calls these fire departments respond to are for emergency medical services -EMS. Frensemeier and Ainsworth try to reduce the amount of time it takes to respond to a call by letting the firemen take home work vehicles so they can go directly to the site without having to stop by the station first.
Frensemeier provides a stipend of $3 a run to his volunteers at the end of the year depending on the number of calls they respond to. But amid limited funding options, Frensemeier and Ainsworth said volunteer-run fire departments are not a sustainable model going forward.
“Deciding what the model for fire protection looks like in this county, we really need to know what the public wants,” Frensemeier said. “We're in a rural community…but if people want what you get in the big city, it costs money, so it's going to come down to them deciding what level of protection do they want, and then between them and the county government figuring out how we fund that kind of option.”
Kelp said it’s not sustainable to rely on mutual aid from other departments when they too have limited volunteers.
“It is not supposed to be a primary system,” she said. “It is a backup system. It is if we need extra manpower. It is if we have a complex situation and we don't have enough responders.”
Other challenges to deal with
Limited funding is a challenge. Kelp’s department consistently receives $20,000 a year from the Town of Nashville. The Washington Township funded $55,000 in 2024 and $75,000 in 2025. The department also gets some money from donations and grants.
In 2025, Kelp spent nearly $92,000 on equipment expenses, about $25,500 on insurance, $23,800 on apparatus maintenance, $5,800 on utilities and about $5,500 on fuel.
There isn’t enough money left over for Kelp to pay for an air conditioning system; they currently have two window units. None of her trucks have had a functioning ladder for the last four years. The smaller separate ladders they have can only reach the second story of a building. Some senior homes have three stories.
“We have patients who are immobile, and they're 100 percent wheelchair bound,” she said. “We're also called here a lot for elevator problems, their elevator goes down constantly. So, what happens in a fire situation? No one's using an elevator… no aerial or ground ladders are going to be able to reach the third floor. Not to mention if we have, say, two volunteers at our station available, and that's a rip and fire, two people aren't going to be able to rescue an entire building. It's just not going to happen.”
Solutions going forward
A total of $50,000 a year from the Jackson Township trustee isn’t enough to keep the Fruitdale station running. Ainsworth hosts bingo every Friday to raise money and also hosts fish frys. He’s also applied for grants to upgrade equipment.
He thinks a way to improve the system could be to ask the county to fund a paid part-time position to more consistently respond to calls during the day. It’s harder for volunteers to come to the station during typical work hours when they work full-time jobs.
At the meeting, Kelp called for a comprehensive county evaluation where all the emergency services, including fire, police and EMS, are analyzed together to see where things can improve. She also encouraged every department to declare its own 5-year plan.
Another option would be to combine the county fire departments into a single district; the Nashville, Fruitdale and Hamblen departments could become a single, staffed fire district with a unified administration. Instead of primarily serving residents within the specific township, departments would respond to calls depending on how close they are to the given location.
This option would include increasing the amount of money in the budget through raising property taxes to hire new staff and expand coverage. The target timeline for these changes is three years.
“We're going to do the best that we possibly can with what we're presented,” said First Lt. Hunter Riebl of the Brown County Volunteer Fire Department. “Increasing taxes, honestly, one of my least favorite things in the world, but to me, I'm willing to pay a little bit more so that my family has a little bit better protection.”
It’s still unclear if Senate Bill 270, which passed this year and requires low-scoring townships to merge with neighboring, higher-scoring townships, will impact Brown County. Regardless, Kelp still recommends combining the fire departments into a single district.
“We would still recommend this, just for the sake of public safety and EMS, because we are essentially renting EMS services right now, and we have to figure that out,” she said.
Any plan would require approval from the county commissioners and town officials. Kelp said she reached out to the commissioners multiple times last year to discuss these challenges, but she never heard back.
Brown County Commissioner Tim Clark said he does not have any comment to provide at this time; he said he is in the process of collecting and analyzing data to better understand the challenges the departments are facing. Nashville Town Manager Sandie Jones declined a request for interview.
