In a dusty warehouse, Charlie Harrison stood next to boxes of blue fire shelters – life-saving, last-resort equipment meant to shield firefighters trapped by flames – and talked about not having enough of them.
“ What we do currently is we put them on every engine,” said Harrison, Crook County’s fire warden and the sole employee in his department. “Every other department I've worked for, we put them on each individual. So that was my goal, was to start getting towards that.”
Wearing a black cap and polo shirt emblazoned with the words “CROOK COUNTY FIRE,” Harrison said he won’t be meeting that goal for the foreseeable future. Property tax cuts passed by the Wyoming Legislature in recent sessions have scorched his department’s budget for new equipment and fire trucks. That’s because property tax revenue goes to fund local governments, not the state.
“ The impacts are spread out through our whole program,” said Harrison, a former firefighter in California. “We're not buying 100 fire shelters so that everybody in our department [can have one]. We bought 30 fire shelters.”
He’s not buying new fire engines either. His depreciation account, which generally funds new vehicle purchases, was slashed by 62.5% by county commissioners looking to make up a nearly $1.8 million revenue reduction countywide. Ideally, the account would have $200,000 in it. Now, it has $75,000.
So Harrison is taking matters into his own hands, trying to turn a flat bed truck into a makeshift fire engine at the Crook County Fire Cache in Sundance, where he works. Besides that one, he has one more fire engine he’s trying to build.
Crook County’s commissioners aren’t to blame for the department’s budgetary woes, he said.
“ It's only through the grace of the commissioners that we have a fire department at all,” he said.
But Harrison doesn’t extend that same level of appreciation for the state lawmakers who voted bills like SF 69 into law. That legislation cut single-family homeowners’ taxes by 25% for the first $1 million of their home's fair market value.
“ They went with the crowd, I think, the people that were complaining about the taxes,” Harrison said. “I don't blame them for that, but I just wish they would've understood the impacts that those cuts were going to have on public service.”
In 2024, Wyoming had its worst fire season in decades. Gov. Mark Gordon said it was “one of the most challenging fire seasons in Wyoming's history.”
That rang true for the northeast corner of the state, where small towns like Sundance, Pine Haven and Moorcroft rely on a network of volunteer departments at the municipal level that have limited resources to battle sometimes-deadly blazes.
Harrison’s job is to coordinate with volunteers to fight fires across the county. When a fire leaps up near Oshoto, he sends out a page and a crackly radio transmission to all the volunteer firefighters in Crook County, seeking help.
To bolster volunteers’ readiness, his department has county vehicles and equipment stationed at each town in what he described as an “essential” partnership.
“ I'm one guy,” Harrison said. “I have 2,200 square miles of response area, almost 90 fire trucks. There's nothing left to cut. We trimmed all the trimming we could do without taking positions. Now, for me, that's hard to [do] because there's only one position.”
The county only recently retired a Ford water truck from 1969.
“When it starts to get [to be] my age – I know how I feel every day when I get up.”
‘Tell them to join a volunteer fire department’
Pine Haven, population 565, is nestled next to the jade-green waters of Keyhole Reservoir.
Pine trees tower over restaurants, a post office and the local fire hall, where volunteer Fire Chief T.J. Gideon inspects a fire engine as red as a brake light.
“So this truck, it's got all of our tools in it, fire line tools,” said Gideon. “It does have a portable tank on it.”
But the county-owned truck needs to be replaced. Gideon needs a five-ton truck that can fit more of his fellow volunteer firefighters.
Luckily, Harrison and Crook County are able to make that happen for him, Gideon said, but some other trucks owned by the town could stand to be replaced or repaired, too.
“Our newest engine that the town owns is 20 years old, and it's time to update it,” he said.
Gideon said he’s lived in Pine Haven for 15 years. He became interested in volunteering after seeing the winking lights of an ambulance driving through town. It made him wonder who was doing that work in such a small community.
“ It's something you don't think about,” he said. “Because the common person just expects that if they call 911, someone's coming. In the rural areas, you're not guaranteed that.”
Volunteer firefighting is a big obligation. It’s not just fighting fires – it’s being ready for them, he said.
“ We train on everything,” Gideon said. “We train on wildland fires, grass fires, stuff like that. We focus a lot on the structural house fires.”
A legislative white paper from 2024 says volunteer recruiting in fire departments across the state is down.
But not in Pine Haven. Currently, there’s 28 volunteers in his department. The youngest is 19 years old, the oldest, 75. They have to make a lot of personal sacrifices to do the job, he added.
“There's times where we pick and choose,” Gideon explained. “‘What are we going to do? It's a beautiful day. Should we go get out on the boat or something?’ But it's a Red Flag day also, which means high fire potential. So you skip it, and you just wait for the page.”
That’s not a hypothetical. While standing next to the fire engine, Gideon talked about a recent birthday party his family held for one of his two daughters by a lake.
“I literally just got there, and the pager went off,” he said. “I knew by the page it was a call that I felt I had to go to, so I did. I chose it. That's where the family support is so important.”
In towns like Pine Haven, firefighters rely on their trucks to work well, especially when a fire gets close to home. In 2021, Gideon said a fire grew large enough to threaten the town.
“I think, ‘Well, my house is up there,’” he said. “So my wife was trying to call, ‘Hey, we need to get this’ – and well, I can’t. And not just my house. All of our volunteers.”
Despite the possible loss of their property, they had to put that worry aside to go fight the fire at the other end of town first, he said.
“We had the most to lose here, but we're still out trying to solve the problem.”
Thankfully, their houses ended up untouched by the fire. Only one residence, two campers and an outbuilding succumbed to the flames.
Some fire trucks in the county are old enough that they worry people like Gideon, because the alternative – having volunteers use their own vehicles – isn’t a great option either.
“You worry about them jumping in their privately operated vehicle driving to a scene,” he said. “You think about a crash there. It's better when you're responding to emergencies, [that] they should be in an emergency vehicle.”
Lawmakers passed property tax cuts to lighten the load on Wyomingites struggling with high rates in some parts of the state.
They’re considering taking the reductions even further by stripping the state Constitution of all language around property tax collection, potentially ending Wyoming’s ability to tax property altogether.
And when voters head to the polls in the 2026 general election, they’ll consider a 50% property tax reduction for those who’ve lived in the state for at least a year in the form of a ballot initiative.
Gideon wants to tell legislators that while he’s grateful his property taxes are going down, he said he’d also “tell them to join a volunteer fire department.”
“See how the budget works and see where the money comes from,” he said. “ The bare minimum, and this is the bare minimum for each new recruit that joins us, is $5,000 for just for his gear. These pants – this stuff is not cheap. The fuel in the trucks. The PPE. The costs on it are ridiculous.”
Just like the county, the town hasn’t been immune to property tax reductions. Gideon said Pine Haven expects to lose around $20,000 due to the exemptions.
But despite the revenue reductions, his motivation to do what he does is still burning hot, he said.
“The biggest reward is after a call, knowing, ‘Hey, we just did that. We just helped with this. We just solved this problem.’”
He and other fire crews recently went out to fight a house fire in Crook County, outside Pine Haven. When they showed up, the house was already engulfed in flames. The sheriff’s office said they suspected the homeowner died inside it.
A press release from the sheriff reads, “[Firefighters’] swift action prevented this from becoming an even greater disaster.”
This reporting was made possible by a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, supporting state government coverage in the state. Wyoming Public Media and Jackson Hole Community Radio are partnering to cover state issues both on air and online.
