BRAZIL, Ind. (WTWO/WAWV)– The Indiana Firefighter’s Volunteer Association met with several area volunteer fire departments on Saturday, to discuss “an opportunity for preserving and improving the volunteer fire system in the state.”
Lobbyist Larry Curl said the meeting revolved around three major issues.
“We need to improve our staffing, we need to improve our funding, and we need to figure out how to do better training,” he said.
The meeting comes as the Van Buren Volunteer Fire Department is short on staffing. Curl said volunteer departments across the state have about 13,000 firefighters currently, which is down from 17,000 a few years ago.
Curl said the IFVA is looking to conduct a dozen of these meetings throughout the state over the next few months.
“We’re actually going to take the feedback we get from going to all these meetings, there will be 12 total,” Curl said. “We’re going to take that information, put it into a document, and share that document with all of our membership and elected officials.”
Curl said the goal is to have a document outlining their next steps shared with volunteer groups and state legislators by the end of the calendar year.
