South Beloit to rely on out-of-state emergency services with bold new plan

SOUTH BELOIT, Ill. (WTVO) — For close to 100 years, the city of South Beloit has relied on part-time firefighters to staff its fire department.

But now, a decade’s worth of staffing shortages has led the city to seek help to staff the department full-time.

“We knew we were in dire need,” said City Administrator Sonya Hoppes. “We brought in an outsider company and they did a study and basically said, ‘Yeah, part time pools across the nation are starting to fail.’ It’s been well over a decade that the bell has been rung and that we didn’t know how we were going to get out of it.”

The city came up with a unique solution: enter into a never-before-attempted agreement with the Town of Beloit Fire Department, from across the state line in Wisconsin.

“This has never happened over a state line before,” Hoppes said. “Lots of county lines, lots of city lines, lots of district lines, but never over a state line. We had no agreement to look at (for reference). We had to make it.”

The Town of Beloit will provide a rotation of three full-time employees around the clock at the South Beloit Firehouse, at 429 Gardner Street.

“It’s a creative world that we have to live in now with the lack of people wanting to go into the public service sector. You know, the lack of paid on-call, paid on-premise. I think that’s one of the big things. They just they were looking for a unique way to solve the problem,” said Town of Beloit Fire Chief Brian Snyder.

Authorities said the part-time South Beloit firefighters were offered full-time positions.

South Beloit officials said their staffing agreement with the Town of Beloit is already being used as a blueprint for departments nationwide who are looking to do something similar.

The staffing agreement begins Friday, October 11th and runs for 5-years before coming up for renewal.

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