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Notes -
Today the local volunteer fire department had this on their sign:
Which sort of begs the question: how in the world do volunteer fire departments exist, especially when there are non-volunteer departments in the same area? Don't they get tired of showing up to calls where someone had a heart attack and so in addition to an ambulance the fire department has to show up too for whatever reason? And how do they even find the time? They all have to work full time, and firefighters presumable skew young and without passive income.
I have a friend that volunteers as a firefighter. One of the disappointing stories he told me was that they were recently told they needed to comply with newly invented needless bureaucratic safetyist paperwork that the regular firefighters have to deal with. Except those guys are paid for it. He said it was really taking the shine off their volunteer work.
I don't blame him for reconsidering. People volunteer because they enjoy what they are doing. Knowing bureaucrats in the public service that have mandated this extra paperwork, they would not know or care about the downstream impacts on manpower that their decision will make.
At least until there's a volunteer manpower shortage and they either pay someone to comply with the onerous amount of boring administration or they wind the requirements back.
So frustrating. High trust, community focused volunteering that contributes to social cohesion and the govt is taking it for granted. Mindless.
As discussed in the thread, in the specific case of volunteer fire departments this is a long way off. Most volunteer departments use their market power to insist that the volunteer firefighters spend a lot of time fundraising when they signed up to fight fires - given the bullshit nature of most fundraising activity, I suspect filling in safety paperwork may be more socially valuable.
The place where safetyist paperwork requirements have driven out the volunteers is youth activities. Lots of adults want to coach youth sports/lead Scout troops. Not that many want to fill out forms to prove they are not a paedophile.
Can confirm this. Though here it's more like a race to the safetyist bottom where everyone tries to be slightly more safetyist than everyone else on the logic that, if an injury happens (even if it the clearly was the kid's own damn fault, and it wasn't even that young), they can avoid blame by pointing to the fact that they've done everything they could. It's not helped by the fact that there have been some really silly lawsuit settlements the last few years.
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Interesting. Most of the volunteer fire departments I’m familiar with get some funding from the local city, town, or township, which is supplemented by one or two major fundraisers per year.
I don’t think the paperwork has much to do with it. I used to spend a lot of time volunteering to help lead youth activities when I was younger. I’d still love to do it now, but if I were to do so as a childless man, I know some parents would assume I had suspect motives. In today’s environment, no amount of paperwork is going to eliminate those concerns, so I abstain.
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The bureaucrats and politicians won't be sad about that either. People that aren't on the payroll don't have the same levers to pull and thus lack the same sort of patron/client relationships that political types thrive on. Oh, sure, there might be budgetary problems, but that usually just resolves as a referendum on property taxes that everyone dutifully agrees need to be raised.
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