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New legislative committee seeks to advance solutions for strained rural emergency services • North Dakota Monitor [1]
['Michael Achterling', 'Abe Streep', 'Erin Hemme Froslie', 'Mary Steurer', 'More From Author', 'August', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow', 'Class', 'Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus', 'Display Inline']
Date: 2025-08-20
North Dakota fire departments and ambulance services are understaffed and facing financial constraints while at the same time responding to more calls and serving large areas, emergency responders told lawmakers Wednesday.
The Legislature has a new interim committee, the Emergency Response Services Committee, that’s working to find solutions.
Rep. Jim Grueneich, R-Ellendale, chair of the committee, said rural communities can be hit the hardest with even small personnel challenges with emergency service providers.
“I think we have to look at what we can do to help these essential services in rural North Dakota, and of course in our urban areas as well,” Grueneich said.
One of the committee’s tasks is a study of volunteer emergency responder recruitment and retention that was mandated by the passage of House Bill 1311 during the 2025 legislative session.
Grueneich said he expects to have legislation drafted ahead of the 2027 legislative session to help emergency services. He added the committee plans to hold four more meetings during the interim with the last meeting focused on debating and editing draft legislation.
Rep. Todd Porter, R-Mandan, owner of Metro-Area Ambulance Service which serves Morton and Burleigh counties, said he thinks one of the most important fixes is recruiting more young people to the profession.
“I do think that we have to start utilizing our CTE (Career and Technical Education) centers, and getting them fully engaged, and doing some of that initial training with our high school students to get them interested in these kinds of important careers,” Porter said.
Porter said the state will still need to subsidize some of the emergency services in rural North Dakota, but having a stable pipeline of workers entering the career field would alleviate some of that stress.
Emergency services personnel from across the state testified to lawmakers about their challenges, including low wages, rising insurance costs, a lack of housing and competition among rural providers for staff and grants.
Some employers have stopped letting volunteer firefighters respond to calls during the workday, said Travis Bateman, director of Badlands Search and Rescue.
He said he understands if oil and gas workers can’t leave their posts to respond to a fire because something might blow up, but he sees more employers not affiliated with critical operations withholding emergency volunteer employees from calls.
“If it’s a non-critical, non-essential role, that’s ridiculous,” Bateman said.
He added some employers do allow their staff to respond to emergency calls and even leave them clocked in as a way to honor their employee’s service.
State Fire Marshal Doug Nelson said North Dakota has 357 fire departments, of which 334 are entirely volunteer-based. Those departments have more than 8,100 firefighters, including about 7,400 volunteers.
The incidents those firefighters respond to have more than doubled over the last decade, he said.
In 2024, firefighters across North Dakota responded to more than 51,500 incidents, up from more than 22,000 in 2014. Those incidents in 2024 included more than 3,000 fires, up from nearly 2,000, 10 years earlier.
Recruitment issues, a lack of resources and increasing equipment costs are not things that will be fixed overnight, Nelson said.
“We just kind of want to come up with some of those basic steps, really ideas, that we need to build further consensus with the fire service and our partners into this committee to make sure we’re all going in the same direction,” Nelson said.
Porter said there are multiple emergency service issues the committee will discuss at future meetings.
“I think there are models out there that would work for our rural areas that don’t necessarily mean an ambulance sitting on every corner,” he said. “In the end, we should be looking at making a huge commitment to solidifying the delivery of those services that people are expecting.”
North Dakota Monitor reporter Michael Achterling can be reached at [email protected].
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