As two southern Chester County fire companies approach consolidation, a group of municipalities spanning roughly 100 square miles are poised to jointly fund them, in what could be one of the largest agreements in the region.
Avondale and West Grove fire companies are expected to become one service, the joint Southern Chester County Fire Rescue, beginning Jan. 1. Alongside this new era for the firefighters could be an inaugural agreement between 10 municipalities to fund the fire company, which is a third-party nonprofit that functions like a contractor.
The goal is a fair system, where all municipalities kick in — as determined by a funding formula — rather than a few shouldering most of the cost while all benefiting from the coverage. However, the road ahead is still rocky, as the municipalities try to iron out an agreement to coincide with the consolidation.
“Each municipality funds the fire company and the ambulances in different levels,” said Ken Battin, township manager for London Grove. “And one of the big things with the 10 municipalities that are going to be served by the new organization is making sure that everybody has a fair and equitable stake in the game.”
A consolidated fire company, and an initial intermunicipal agreement, will mean more resources and stabilized budgets for both the company and the municipalities that fund it, fire and local officials from several communities said.
“I think it is necessary. I really do. I think it’s necessary just to better provide the community with the service,” said Guy Swift, president of Avondale Fire Company who will serve as vice president in the new organization. “It’s going to happen more and more, I think, across the commonwealth and other places.”
An increasing number of consolidated companies
The two fire companies began looking at a merger in 2024. They were facing similar issues: a declining number of volunteers, fishing from the same pond for career firefighters, and high costs to operate.
It’s not an unfamiliar story in the region. Those reasons have been at the heart of other regionalization efforts, such as for the five municipalities that formed the Kennett Fire and EMS Regional Commission in 2017, and Swarthmore and Nether Providence exploring a merger with four other towns earlier this year.
Many town leaders have begun to consider and implement these agreements as public safety costs continue to rise — for many, taking up roughly half of each year’s budget — but revenues fail to keep pace.
With those challenges in mind, Swift and Neil Vaughn, the president of West Grove’s fire company who will serve at the helm of the conjoined effort, started talking about bringing their organizations together. They hired a consultant and, last November, asked their members to vote on a joinder.
It passed, with more than 70% of each company’s members green-lighting the consolidation, they said.
In January, pending final approvals and regardless of what the municipalities iron out for a funding mechanism, the two will become one organization, for a total of 30 full-time and 98 part-time firefighters; with four existing fire stations in Avondale, West Grove, New London, and London Britain Township; and about 30 pieces of equipment between them. There was already some established overlap; some career firefighters for one company also volunteer for the other, and vice versa. Those firefighters have a choice ahead of them, between volunteer or career status, but otherwise, the plan is to retain all the positions across companies, the leaders said.
Vaughn and Swift believe they’ll have the largest territory — 100 square miles, 10 municipalities, around 45,000 residents — to cover in the county.
“There’s a lot of eyes upon us as far as even from the state level, federal level,” Swift said. “There’s a lot of people, they’re seeing how this plays out. … We want it to be as positive as it could be.”
Still, for residents, from the outside, “Come Jan. 1, it’s going to look almost the same way that we operate now,” Vaughn said.
But big changes could be coming to how municipalities fund it. For years, the two fire companies have relayed their budgets to the municipalities — which include Avondale, Franklin, London Britain, Londonderry, London Grove, New London, New Garden, Penn, West Grove, and West Marlborough — and asked for funds. With very few ways to raise funds without levying taxes, some municipalities haven’t met that contribution request, but still received coverage.
Under a proposed new system, which would be an interim agreement for two years, a formula would weigh property values, population size, and call volume and calculate how each municipality should feed into the fire company’s overall budget. What could be a 30% part of one municipality’s budget could be 3% of another’s.
Though the merger will cut out some redundancies in purchasing equipment and sharing resources, leaders at the fire companies and officials don’t think consolidation will necessarily be cheaper for everyone.
In fact, costs will go up at first as some meet the full requests for the first time, said Christopher Himes, New Garden township manager. But the fire officials believe increases will be less dramatic in the future — and will be a bit more predictable moving forward.
It’s ultimately worth the cost, though, Himes said.
“What you are paying for is time,” he said. “It’s an insurance policy for your community and … anytime you decommit or deprioritize funding for your local fire and EMS service, you are committing to adding time to the response. And I think most people would believe that’s not the direction you want to go.”
The intermunicipal agreement started by looking at the future, and realizing that as volunteer numbers dwindle and there’s more need for paid career staff, costs were going to continue to rise, said Steve Zurl, chairman of London Grove’s board of supervisors.
“But rather than get to that point and say, ‘Guys, we’ve got a disaster. There’s no way we can afford to run this operation. We’re going broke,’ we figure we get something in place now and be able to handle what the needs are in the future,” he said.
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