Concord’s police and fire departments are reporting a strong recovery in their ability to attract and keep employees, after securing new union contracts with higher annual raises.
“We were in what I would call a severe recruitment crisis for the past couple of years at least,” Fire Chief John Chisholm said, presenting an annual report to the city’s public safety board. “The good news is that we are starting to climb out of that.”
The fire department recently brought in eight new recruits at once, he noted, an unprecedented pull. While the department currently still carries vacancies, especially among paramedics, he said the inflow has been strong enough to shift the department’s focus to retention.
The police department is reporting similar improvement in staffing levels, though more from retention than recruitment.
“We took some drastic measures as a police department and a community,” said Deputy Chief Steven Smagula, crediting not only contract negotiations but temporary increased overtime pay, retention bonuses and a change in recruitment strategy. “We went from our worst year of turnover in 30 years to our best – in 12 months.”
For the last few years, attracting and hanging onto quality candidates in public safety has been an issue in Concord and across the state. Better pay and benefits under new contracts and, for police, a facility upgrade have delivered improvement.
Those investments also came with costs.
City Hall is pulling together a budget proposal to present to the city council next month. Rising costs are weighing on municipal budgets across New Hampshire, and Concord carries the added spending weight of several large recent capital projects and relatively slow recent tax base growth.
At the same time, the fire department is pushing for the addition of an engine to the city’s fleet and the positions to staff it, saying that the department is stretched too thin to cover current call volumes and that response times have suffered.
New contracts and the city budget
Since the start of 2025, city officials have agreed to 5% annual raises for members of the four public safety unions and increased vacation time broadly. City council also signed off on a near-$50 million new police station, which is currently under construction.
As noted by department leaders , those investments have made a real difference to current and prospective city employees.
Salaries and benefits are the overwhelming majority of the city’s general expenses, and 41% of its operational budget goes toward public safety.
The new contracts alone add well over $1 million annually in salaries and benefits to city spending compared to previous agreements, which generally carried 4% raises. The first round of debt service on the police station will also come due in next year’s budget, alongside rising costs for fuel, health insurance and construction. The City Council will begin deliberations next month, and officials are bracing to make cuts and, likely, layoffs.
“I think we’re going to have to make some draconian decisions,” Mayor Byron Champlin said in a recent interview. “Unless you start looking at personnel, it is very difficult to make major reductions in the budget.”
Contracts are negotiated outside of the city budget process. Once the agreements are approved, the terms are fixed.
Recruitment and retention played a role, as city leaders said they sought to remain competitive with statewide peers and with career opportunities outside of public safety.
An understaffed fire or police department doesn’t necessarily equate to being short handed: Empty shifts are often filled by employees taking on overtime. The added hours can be hard for morale, but they can also mean major bumps in individual employees’ take-home pay. Officers and firefighters made up seven of the ten highest paid city employees in 2025 as a result of overtime.
Adding firefighters and Engine 1
At the fire department, the recent flow of new members as well as more supports for professional development are the targeted remedies for turnover. Even though the force is currently considered fully staffed, fire department leaders have said staffing levels aren’t sufficient.
There are four districts for fire coverage in the city, at the center, north, east and south. District 1, at the center, carries a single tower truck while each of the surrounding districts has a fire engine. Towers are key tools for rescues but don’t carry their own water, which can be key in the early minutes of fire suppression.
Over the last few years, the department has been pushing for the addition of an engine at the central district, arguing it would improve safety and reduce damage risk citywide, as well as relieve demand on the more expensive tower truck. Chisholm has reiterated that call ahead of the 2027 budget, arguing instead for a phased approach.
But purchasing another engine and adding the staff to operate it, even over a few years, carries a steep price tag, and the pitch hasn’t won support from city leaders in the recent past.
City leaders cut an engine in the central district amid recessionary pressures in 2009.
A 2022 emergency response study commissioned by the city and quoted in the report found that “the lack of a suppression unit capable of providing a fire water flow, equivalent for the building types contained within that district, at Central Station 1 allows for a substantial risk within the historic downtown area.”
The need, according to the department, hasn’t gone away.
Bringing back Engine 1 would have a number of benefits, according to Justin Kantar, the president of the firefighters union, including improved firefighter safety, accelerated search and rescue efforts and reduced property loss.
The fire department’s annual report outlines call frequency per fire apparatus in Concord as higher than its peers in Manchester and Nashua.
Nashua Fire, it cites as an example, fielded 29% more calls for service than Concord last year. With around half the square mileage, Nashua did so with twice the wheels on the ground: six engines and three ladders, compared to three engines and one tower in Concord.
When emergency responses overlap, units from one part of the city are often crossing town to respond to concurring calls, affecting response times. As the largest district and often farthest from other calls, the Penacook area has seen a disproportionate increase in overall response promptness, per the report.
Citywide, the amount of fire and EMS response within five minutes of a 911 call is slipping, falling more than 10% over the last three years, according to the report.
Chisholm has proposed a phased approach to reinstating the engine downtown, bringing on the three or four staff positions over time and purchasing a new engine now, anticipating a delay in its arrival. An unsuccessful request for the reinstatement of Engine 1 in the 2026 budget was estimated to cost just about $1.25 million.
Crime, calls hold steady
Overall calls for service, to both police and fire, saw small upticks in 2025 but have been largely steady over the last few years.
At 1,337, total crimes rose by just ten in 2025, per the police department’s report, and arrests rose by a similarlly small margin, up just over 40 to 2,565.
At the fire department, data show the percentage of EMS and Fire responses arriving within five minutes fell by 4% and 3% respectively.
Building fires more than doubled last year, up to 72 from 33. Chisholm didn’t pinpoint a specific cause, but he pegged public education and outreach about fire safety as the primary solution. The city added an additional fire marshal this year with an eye towards speedier fire investigations and improved community communication.
