Less is More
The great Chicago architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe once quipped, “less is more.” His pioneering vision stripped buildings down to their bare essentials and restored a sense of human scale and purpose to the urban form.
The fire service could learn a lot from modernist architects. Rather than turning their backs on their profession, Mies, Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius deconstructed and renewed architecture by focusing on its essential purpose: making buildings work for people. How could we make the fire service work better for our communities?
In recent years, fire agencies around the developed world have pursued a modernization agenda that has seen an unprecedented expansion of the services they offer the public. But do people really need these services or do they use them because they have already paid for them?
Look closely at who pays and who benefits when fire agencies deliver these services. Until recently, the provision of fire and rescue services was widely, if not universally, considered a public good. Public goods have two distinctive characteristics: anyone can use them and the use by one individual does not diminish the amount available for someone else to consume. For the most part, fire service meets the first part of this test. But as the consumption of these services rises because of free access and diversification of service offerings, the quality and the quantity of service available to others has come under increasing pressure.
The fire service has argued vigorously that the supply of services should expand to meet rising demands as a way of preserving the public good character of the service. But these arguments are tainted by the fact that in most cases calls for such expansion benefit those delivering the service more than those consuming the service by creating more jobs and pushing managerial pay scales higher.
One way of managing demands involves charging fees for certain services. This simple act transforms the service provided for a fee into a private good rather than a public good; the value extracted from the consumption is related directly to both the consumer’s ability and willingness to pay. Inability to pay excludes people who might need the service from enjoying its consumption or requires others to cross-sibsidize their consumption when efforts to collect the fee fail. Willingness to pay encourages rivalry as competing conceptions of the value derived from the service by the consumer drive demand for its consumption at various price points. Cost recovery or fees for attendance at false alarms are a good case in point. Many building owners would rather pay for fire service attendance at false alarm rather than upgrade their fire alarm systems.
Fire and rescue services have historically avoided fees for service because they marginalize or exclude the most vulnerable in society from consuming the services. When this happens, others in the community can suffer undesirable consequences even if they could otherwise afford to pay and would be willing to do so to avoid the harm caused by another’s failure to consume the service when it was truly needed, especially when doing so sooner rather than later would reduce the costs and consequences for all concerned. Economists refer to this situation as a negative externality.
Many fire and emergency services recognize externalities can be either negative or positive. As such, many enabling statutes specifically preclude charges for services that benefit others besides those who deliver and consume them, like fire prevention services. Oddly, some fire departments take exactly the opposite stance, charging for fire prevention activities such as plan review and inspection services because they relate to specific projects and require permits or regulatory consent and involve profit-motive transactions among the other participants.
In the absence of simple and accessible ways of reducing the costs of maintaining fire service as a public good, many fire and emergency services have sought to extract greater value from each unit of investment and production as a means of increasing efficiency.
Innovators recognize four primary pathways for improving products and services:
- Change the product or service;
- Add accessories;
- Add complementary products or services; and
- Enhance the product or service delivery channel.
The fire service has pursued the last three of these pathways with vigor. But have we ever really established though whether the services we provide are the right ones for our communities? A close look at the situation reveals significant inconsistencies in our own expectations, not just those of the communities we serve.
Instead of seeking additional fire sprinkler requirements as an alternative form of fire service delivery or granting financial incentives for the installation of protection beyond minimum building code requirements, many communities and fire service advocates are seeking both higher building standards and the adoption of minimum staffing and response time requirements in their communities. If firefighters believe, as they suggest, that sprinklers will mean smaller, less threatening fires, then why would fire departments need to maintain high staffing and low response-time standards when more buildings are better protected? The answer lies in the large proportion of existing buildings that will require protection despite our best efforts to raise the bar for others.
How then can we improve protection and lower the costs of providing fire safety for our communities. We can start by considering how economic incentives influence the choices people in our communities make. If we continue to increase the range and scope of services we provide as a means of increasing productivity then the internal efficiencies we achieve may come at the cost of community welfare when demand for these “free” services outstrips our ability to meet community expectations. Doing fewer things better as a means of improving the economic efficiency of our agencies may require us to consider ways of encouraging greater consumption of preventive services and those activities that promote positive externalities.
Less can be more if rediscover the essential truth about fire services: people are prepared to protect what they value. We can restore a human scale to our service and make fire and rescue services work for people even before they find themselves in strife. Doing this will require us to tailor our service to the community’s preference for prevention rather than cure. Making such changes will ensure that benefits accrue to both those who pay and those who consume our services.
