Ocean Pines Volunteer Fire Department President Dave Van Gasbeck, left, and Chief Steve Grunewald are striving to bolster recruitment and retention efforts to maintain a full complement of emergency responders.

Scarcity of volunteers becomes greater issue

By Greg Ellison

(Feb. 6, 2020) The Ocean Pines Volunteer Fire Department, which was established on a shoestring budget nearly a half century ago, now faces mounting challenges to recruit and retain members.

President Dave Van Gasbeck said area demographics have traditionally added a layer of difficulty to recruit volunteers.

“We have a relatively older volunteer group,” he said. “The demographics in this community are 37 percent of the people … are over 65 [and] probably about 50 percent are part-timers.

“Most of the people we’ve been getting over the last couple of years have been retired out of Baltimore … and other locations,” he said. “They were career or volunteer somewhere else and want to continue their affiliation.”

Van Gasbeck said maintaining the current complement of 50 volunteers, who are bolstered by roughly a dozen full- and part-time firefighter or paramedics staff members, becomes more daunting as aging members step aside.

“If you look at that package together, it’s a great challenge for us to recruit and with the aging of our department, it’s a challenge to retain,” he said. “We lost three members this year.”

Chief Steve Grunewald said the focus has shifted to developing a recruitment and retention package over the last few years.

“It’s a slow process,” he said. “We want something that’s going to be worthwhile.”

The department has several classifications for volunteers:, firefighters who must be full-time pines residents and over 18 years of age; associates from other emergency organizations living in the area; administrative positions open to anyone with free time to support operations; and a cadet program for youths ages 14-18 with parental permission.

“We’re trying to come up with a retention package that can be presented to the members once they join … and also the ones that have been here for 5, 10 or 20 years,” he said.

Van Gasbeck said attracting younger members through the largely underutilized cadet program is another focus.

“Even with the families that are raising their young ones around here, we do get very few cadets,” he said. “We have two now.”

Grunewald said the department is looking to work with Worcester Technical High School in Newark through its fire/EMT training program offered for juniors and seniors.

“We’re always looking to start cadets young and get them through training,” he said.

Van Gasbeck has prepared a PowerPoint presentation outlining the merits of pursuing a career in emergency response to inform students about the cadet program in Ocean Pines, which meets a training program prerequisite.

“If they sign up for the program in the high school, they have to affiliate with a department,” he said.

Grunewald also said the recruitment and retention package under development would likely be a tiered program that would include state tax credits by the third year.

“We have an open house, but also want to do a recruitment night,” he said.

While the annual open house event in August is aimed at the larger community, the recruitment effort would provide information about specific types of memberships and allow interested parties to survey fire and rescue equipment.

Grunewald said although the sentiment might be lost on younger generations, the intangible rewards of helping people in potentially life and death situations are substantial.

“The amount of volunteers is declining, whether it’s the [American] Red Cross or the Salvation Army, because of the age of what’s out there right now,” he said. “The 50-year-old’s, like myself and Dave, we were brought up that if you want something you work for it, not what’s in it for me or what do I get out of it.”

Van Gasbeck said volunteer fire fighting often makes an indelible impact on those who answer the call to duty.

“It’s a passion and it’s in the blood,” he said. “It’s something that … becomes part of you, [and] frankly, once it’s part of you, it’s in your system.”

Highlighting the importance of having a largely volunteer crew to support the small number of paid staff,  Grunewald said the equivalent cost would be astronomical without community members’ involvement.

“If we don’t do something, the alternative is to have a career department and that is millions upon millions of dollars a year,” he said.

Ocean Pines Volunteer Fire Department President Dave Van Gasbeck, left, and Chief Steve Grunewald are striving to bolster recruitment and retention efforts to maintain a full complement of emergency responders.

back to an earlier era, Van Gasbeck recalled President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural speech that challenged a generation to “ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.”

“We grew up with a sense of we have a responsibility to our world and community,” he said. “We just choose to exercise it through this venue.”