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PHOENIX - A man's house burned to the ground, but that wasn't his only shock -- because two weeks later, he received a bill for almost $20,000 from the private fire department.

Purcell and his wife were not staying in the home when it caught fire in August. They arrived later, only to watch firefighters douse hot spots.

"It's definitely a shocker when you come back and your house is gone," said Purcell. But another perhaps bigger shocker was in the mail. Two weeks after the fire that gutted Purcell's home, he got a bill from Rural Metro Fire Department for $19,825.

"Definitely was a surprise.. was a shocker when we got that," said Purcell.

Purcell lives in an unincorporated area that has no fire coverage. Williams says the bill includes Surprise firefighters who were first on the scene.

Rural Metro spokesperson Colin Williams says that the fees are fair, that there is a mutual aid agreement with the Surprise Fire Department. We asked to look at the mutual aid agreement, but we're told there isn't one in writing.

"We do have what I call a gentleman's agreement," said Williams.

Surprise firefighters were on the scene within 13 minutes. It took Rural Metro 24 minutes to get there.

"They got here late and his house is totally gone. Then they're going to charge him $20,000. I don't think that's right at all," said Brian Repp who lives nearby.

Residents living in the area pay a fire district assistance tax. The name alone implies it goes towards fire service in their area, but it doesn't. It's a county-wide tax to help fund volunteer fire districts.

The people in Purcell's neighborhood have no fire coverage, but they say they didn't know that until after Purcell's house fire. "Coincidentally, we all received a bill from Rural Metro fire informing us we have no fire coverage in our area, so they highly suggested we begin paying some fire coverage that we didn't currently have," said Miller.

Thinking they were already paying for fire coverage, residents were skeptical that Rural Metro, who just filed for bankruptcy, was trying to make a buck marketing their fire subscription.

Admittedly, Rural Metro didn't market the subscription to Purcell's area until recently, because their closest fire station is 20 miles away. "It'd take a significant amount of time for us to respond to that area," said Williams.

Highlighted on the back of the subscription, it reads, "Response times will vary." So with the options for people living here are: buy a yearly subscription, which is around $500 from Rural Metro for a service that is 20 miles away or take their chances and get a huge bill if their home burns. A third option is to form their own fire district. It can take months and ultimately a board will decide if they'll contract out fire service or form a volunteer department.

Purcell had insurance on his home, but it doesn't cover the Rural Metro bill. Purcell says he would have gladly paid a yearly subscription fee had he known that was an option. With a newborn baby, the couple doesn't know where they're going to get the money from. Rural Metro does have payment plans, but says it doesn't give people the option to let their home burn. http://www.myfoxphoenix.com/story/23888502/2013/11/05/man-gets-20k-bil
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Last week, an accident inside Gene Cranick's Obion, TN home started a fire. As the fire quickly spread throughout the house, the Cranicks escaped from their home and called their fire department. Yet the local firefighters, operating under the auspices of the South Fulton Fire Department (SFFD), refused to respond to the call, noting that their service was available to the rural residents of Obion County only by subscription, and the Cranicks had not paid the annual $75 fee. When the fire spread to the surrounding properties, the neighbors -- who had paid the fee -- called the firefighters. And so, the firefighters arrived on the scene, but they stood by and watched as the Cranick residence burned to the ground, refusing to assist the pleading family -- which offered to pay them anything on the spot to help. Even though most of the country was outraged by the case of the Cranicks, leading conservatives in the media immediately jumped at the chance to defend the actions of the SFFD and condemn the family in question. The story of Gene Cranick's home illustrates the ascendancy of a compassion-less conservative philosophy that believes in the on-your-own society and has virtually abandoned the common-good creed that we are our brothers keepers. https://www.facebook.com/notes/national-committee-to-preserve-social-s
ecurity-and-medicare/heres-a-terrifying-example-of-why-privatization-is-not-the-answernot-just-for-so/439936142220]

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As fire danger climbs here in the West, fire protection is gradually being added to the list of essential services for which the rich are better off than their less fortunate neighbors. It’s a list that already includes better healthcare for those with costly medical insurance; better education for those who can afford expensive private schools; greater personal safety for wealthy residents able to fund private security patrols.

Privatization of fire protection, especially in the Western United States, has emerged in several forms. In some instances, private contractors are hired by state and local government to deal with extreme fire emergencies. The National Wildfire Suppression Association, formed in 1991, represents over 150 private firms that employ firefighters and equipment to assist locally on an “as needed’’ basis.

Quite a different form of private fire protection is being funded by large insurance companies. Last year, Chubb Corp. began offering fire protection to its clients in 13 Western states as long as their homes have a replacement value of at least $1 million. According to an Associated Press report, Fireman’s Fund has retained private fire fighting companies in California; AIG employs private firms to dispense fire-retardant foam on valuable homes as soon as there is a wildfire threat for clients in the 200 wealthiest Western zip codes.

Yet another, more socially vexing concept is the one designed by companies such as Golden Valley Fire Suppression, based in Carmel Valley, Calif. Next month the firm will begin selling private fire services directly to property owners in areas already served by municipal fire departments. For a fee of $30,000, the company will supply fire protection for as long as the customer owns the home. It plans to station its own fire trucks in carefully chosen “clusters’’ near paying customers in order to guarantee a response time of under five minutes. Golden Valley intends to launch similar operations in Las Vegas and Tucson.

It’s hard to fault wealthy homeowners for seeking additional protection for valuable property, especially after several years of devastating wildfires in California. A turning point for many came in October 2007 when fire destroyed over 375 homes near San Diego in an area where local fire protection was inadequate.

On the other hand, an increasing role for private firms in basic safety services such as fire and police protection prompts concern over training procedures, reliability, and accountability. Moreover, privatization can lead to a spiral in which reduced public services cause increased private involvement, which, in turn, leads to even more cuts in public funding.

What happens to those residents in areas served by Golden Valley who decline to purchase the high-priced private fire protection? As private service expands, publicly funded fire service is likely to become even less reliable. Municipalities are less likely to fund additional fire protection in areas where it is largely handled by the private sector. http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2009
/06/30/privatizing_fire_protection/]

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Privatization push: Can fire departments survive?

There's a big move to privatize not just EMS service delivery but fire departments as well http://www.firerescue1.com/fire-ems/articles/1045264-Privatization-pus
h-Can-fire-departments-survive/]

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Despite many promises that prison privatization will lead to big cost savings, such savings — as a comprehensive study by the Bureau of Justice Assistance, part of the U.S. Department of Justice, concluded — “have simply not materialized.” To the extent that private prison operators do manage to save money, they do so through “reductions in staffing patterns, fringe benefits, and other labor-related costs.”

Privatization is a way of getting rid of public employees, who do have a habit of unionizing and tend to lean Democratic in any case. But the main answer, surely, is to follow the money. As more and more government functions get privatized, states become pay-to-play paradises, in which both political contributions and contracts for friends and relatives become a quid pro quo for getting government business. Are the corporations capturing the politicians, or the politicians capturing the corporations? Does it matter?

Now, someone will surely point out that nonprivatized government has its own problems of undue influence, that prison guards and teachers’ unions also have political clout, and this clout sometimes distorts public policy. Fair enough. But such influence tends to be relatively transparent. Everyone knows about those arguably excessive public pensions; it took an investigation by The Times over several months to bring the account of New Jersey’s halfway-house-hell to light.

The point, then, is that you shouldn’t imagine that what The Times discovered about prison privatization in New Jersey is an isolated instance of bad behavior. It is, instead, almost surely a glimpse of a pervasive and growing reality, of a corrupt nexus of privatization and patronage that is undermining government across much of our nation. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/22/opinion/krugman-prisons-privatizatio
n-patronage.html#h]

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Since any full-fledged, free-market privatization program with full transparency, such as the universal vouchers Friedman championed, is politically unrealistic today, current efforts towards privatization of our schools have instead resulted in a monstrously distorted market much like our dysfunctional health care system. Free market competition sounds neat, but adding another layer of rent-seeking in our education system does not. Large corporations already exert an inordinate influence on our political system before and after Citizens United, and any privatization scheme now would expose the education system further to their machinations. The American people are already saddled with military-industrial and prison-industrial complexes. Creating another one, the education-industrial complex (which some authors argue is already happening), does a great disservice to the nation and especially the young among us.

The call to privatize schools, along with the efforts across the country to render aspects of public education into private hands, is a symptom of governments' and parents' desire to escape from the current dilemma, to find a “savior” from outside instead of facing problems head-on and taking responsibility. http://www.policymic.com/articles/53485/privatize-schools-why-it-s-cro
ny-capitalism-at-its-worst]

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Libertarians, in calling for the abolition of state property and services, typically call for a process of "privatization" that relies heavily on the corporate capitalist model of ownership. The property of the State should be auctioned off and its services performed by, say, GiantGlobalCorp LLC. And the picture of the future market economy, so far as business enterprise is concerned, is simply the present corporate economy minus the regulatory and welfare state--an idealized version of Nineteenth Century "robber baron capitalism." That ignores the issue of state capitalism, of the extent to which the giant corporations that have received the lion's share of their profits from the State can be regarded either as legitimate private property.

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