The Rye Fire Department is “grossly understaffed” given the demands and dangers of modern firefighting, the union president recently told The Record, despite the city’s initial refusal to hire additional manpower for next year.
The city currently employs 22 career firefighters across its two firehouses on Milton Point and Locust Avenue, but Ricky Colasacco, the Rye Professional Firefighters Local 2029 president, said the situation at times is so dire that only one firefighter is on duty at the Milton Point station.
“With all the duties that come with the job, it’s made it very, very difficult and challenging to be short staffed,” he said.
Following concerns being raised by several city leaders during a City Council budget workshop last month —where Public Safety Commissioner Michael Kopy said the staffing levels at Rye FD are so bad that calling them low “doesn’t do it justice” — a budget amendment is now being proposed to add a firefighter to the 2026 spending plan.
“We have to have people in the firehouse,” Kopy told the council. “The firehouse staffing, I don’t even want to say it’s at the bare minimum — very, very low.”
City officials said the hiring of an additional firefighter would help satisfy the “two-in, two-out” safety requirement — having two firefighters to enter a hazardous area while two others remain outside to provide backup — and reduce overtime costs.
But Colasacco said one firefighter doesn’t solve the problem.
“It’s a step in the right direction, however, we are far from having adequate levels of staffing,” he said. “I don’t know how we get there. For a job where seconds count … it’s necessary.”
The city, in the midst of finalizing its municipal budget for 2026, had not initially planned on hiring additional fire personnel when the budget was first unveiled in early November. Interim City Manager Brian Shea noted that the city has recently added staff to both the fire and police departments and that the “longer-term plan will provide for more staffing” in the years ahead.
Salaries and wages for the Rye FD are being budgeted to increase by 7.46 percent for 2026, according to Deputy Comptroller Joseph Fazzino.
The department’s overtime expenses are also projected to rise by $100,000, to $700,000 next year.
Outgoing Mayor Josh Cohn said that a few years ago, the city moved to increase staffing, but when considering the “two in, two out” rule, he is “not sure that we’re consistently achieving that without overtime.”
“Our expectation was that we wouldn’t be seeing an overtime expense of $700,000 a year with those staffing increases, which leads me to at least the tentative conclusion that we didn’t do enough,” Cohn added.
There has been only one new hire, Colasacco said, since he joined the department in 2020.
Meanwhile, call volume has skyrocketed 40 percent over the past eight years, as the city has shifted away from its once active volunteer base — an issue plaguing fire departments across the U.S. Fewer than five qualified interior firefighters are current volunteers in Rye, and they respond to less than 10 percent of calls, according to Colasacco.
The department, he explained, would need 15 firefighters on scene within 10 minutes of a structure fire to comply with National Fire Protection Association guidelines and Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) guidelines.
“We don’t fulfill any of that,” Colasacco said. “We rely heavily on our mutual aid partners, but there’s no guarantee they’re coming.”
Firefighters are often tied up at fires or emergencies that can last several hours. When another call comes in, they either have to wait for help from a neighboring department, or pull a firefighter from the ongoing situation to respond alone.
This, the union president said, can make it hard to handle multiple emergencies in Rye simultaneously.
“You cannot do the job of a firefighter with the amount of people that we have — we are still way behind the eight-ball,” he added. “We are grossly understaffed and it needs to be taken care of.”
