Since 2000, almost no cities of any size in the state of Wisconsin have grown in population as fast as Sun Prairie. Neighboring communities like Windsor, Cottage Grove, and the Town of Bristol have also experienced explosive growth. The arrival of new housing, businesses, residents, and workers has brought prosperity and opportunity, but also stressed emergency services in the area.
Perhaps not unexpectedly, the last several years have also brought rapid change in the nature of those services. Until relatively recently, Sun Prairie had an unusual arrangement, with a typical city emergency medical services department but a fire department that was its own separate nonprofit.
Since then, the structure and commitments of those emergency departments have been changing. In 2023, the city’s emergency medical services department added more than 100 square miles of territory in the village of Marshall and three more towns. In June 2023, SSM closed its Emergency Center in the city. That decision eliminated the main emergency room for Sun Prairie’s EMS calls and added roughly 20 minutes each way to ambulance trips by city paramedics, contributing to the city’s decision to add full-time staffing for a third ambulance that was previously only for peak hours.
In 2024, Sun Prairie’s nonprofit Fire Department formally joined city government for the first time. Today, a single fire chief leads both the city’s Fire Department and its Emergency Medical Services Department. Other changes are also being pursued, including new agreements with the city of Madison to help ensure additional resources and responses to fight fires and better serve individuals experiencing mental distress.
Despite these proactive efforts, the city of Sun Prairie has experienced challenges in sustaining its emergency services, including rising costs and call volumes and difficulties in recruiting and retaining paid on premise staff. This is neither unusual nor surprising. Over the past 12 years, the Wisconsin Policy Forum has or will soon complete about 20 studies for municipal and county governments in all parts of Wisconsin on fire and emergency medical services (EMS) challenges and possible solutions. As we noted in In Need of Resuscitation?, an October 2021 report reflecting on our work in this area:
Many fire and EMS agencies are finding it harder to operate each year due to increasing service calls from an aging population and staff recruitment and retention difficulties. Lagging state aid and state-imposed limits on local property taxes often compound the problem, creating a difficult road ahead for many local governments throughout Wisconsin.
In this report supported by the city as well as the towns of Bristol and Sun Prairie, we review the city’s emergency services and ways that Sun Prairie could strengthen them, both on its own and in collaboration with its neighbors. We do not offer a single recommended solution to the various challenges identified, but instead lay out a range of options for decision makers to consider.
Our programmatic and fiscal analysis for each option has been aided by officials from the city, who supplied data, information, and insights, and discussed the options. The report is designed not to force local officials to specific conclusions, but rather to provide sufficient analysis to help them arrive at a course of action that will ensure high-quality, efficient, and cost-effective fire and EMS service levels for residents of Sun Prairie and surrounding communities for the foreseeable future.