The overwhelming majority of calls handled by the Duluth Fire Department do not involve fires. The department recorded 15,344 medical and other nonsuppression calls in 2025, compared with 290 calls for fire suppression. That works out to roughly 53 medical and nonfire calls for every reported fire.
Many of those calls require an immediate emergency response. Others might be handled more economically by a nurse, community paramedic, social worker or smaller medical unit.
That distinction could become increasingly important as Duluth confronts a projected multimillion-dollar budget shortfall and rising employee costs.
Police and fire account for about $55.3 million, or 49%, of Duluth’s $113.2 million general fund. Police spending is budgeted at $30.5 million in 2026, while the Fire Department receives $24.8 million.
Duluth cannot resolve its projected deficit by trimming office supplies and travel. But it may be able to control public safety costs by changing how it responds to thousands of calls that do not require a conventional police officer or a fully staffed fire engine.
Cities from Denver to Houston are experimenting with that approach. Instead of cutting emergency services across the board, they are creating different levels of response based on the urgency and nature of each call.
For Duluth, one of the first tests is fire overtime. The Fire Department exceeded its 2025 overtime budget by $1.3 million. The city added three firefighters and placed an $850,000 cap on fire overtime for 2026, betting that additional regular staffing will cost less than repeatedly calling employees back at overtime rates.
The result will depend on whether the city can control the vacancies, sick leave, vacation coverage and minimum staffing requirements that generate overtime.
Duluth’s budget calls for a yearlong review of the department’s staffing model and overtime trends. It also calls for refining lower-priority dispatch protocols and measuring how often fire apparatus is used.
The city has not promised that those changes will produce a specific amount of savings. To determine whether they work, officials would need to publish overtime by station, shift and cause, along with the cost of the additional firefighters and any changes in emergency response times.
Medical calls offer a potentially larger opportunity. Under a tiered system, dispatchers could continue sending full fire and ambulance responses to cardiac arrests, serious crashes, breathing emergencies and other life-threatening incidents. Less urgent calls could be transferred to a nurse, handled by a community-paramedicine team or assigned to a smaller vehicle instead of a fire engine.
Houston uses an emergency telehealth program that allows selected 911 patients to speak remotely with a physician. In one reported year, 92% of the 6,008 people served by the program were directed to transportation other than a Houston Fire Department ambulance.
Seattle operates Health One, which pairs firefighters with case managers to handle nonemergency medical complaints, behavioral-health cases and frequent 911 callers. The program responded more than 1,300 times in 2024, allowing conventional emergency units to remain available for higher-priority incidents.
Such programs do not eliminate costs. Nurses, paramedics and social workers must still be paid. The savings come when a lower-cost response actually replaces a more expensive one, reduces repeat calls or allows a city to operate with less overtime and fewer additional emergency units.
The same principle could be applied to Duluth police. The Police Department recorded 86,013 calls for service in 2025, up from 83,555 the previous year. The department reported 130 sworn officers and 29 professional employees.
Duluth already operates the CORE behavioral-health program, which pairs police officers with social workers. It also has a substance-use response team that connects people with treatment and other services.
Those programs can reduce repeated contact with police, hospitals and the county jail. But a co-response still requires an officer.
A more substantial cost reform would allow civilian crisis workers to respond without police to carefully screened calls involving homelessness, intoxication, welfare checks and mental-health concerns when there is no reported weapon, violence or immediate threat.
Albuquerque, New Mexico, has made civilian response a separate city department. Albuquerque Community Safety reported handling more than 45,000 calls during fiscal 2025, primarily involving mental health, homelessness and substance use. During one recent reporting period, civilian responders requested police assistance in less than 1% of their calls.
Denver’s Support Team Assisted Response program sends a paramedic and behavioral-health clinician instead of police to selected low-risk calls. A peer-reviewed study of the pilot found a 34% reduction in reported low-level offenses in areas served by the program, without a detectable increase in serious crime.
Duluth could also reduce costs by reserving sworn officers for duties that require police powers. Professional employees could take delayed theft and vandalism reports, process evidence, conduct some background investigations, manage records and handle traffic control. Online and telephone reporting could replace officer visits when a crime is no longer in progress and no suspect is present.
Regional cooperation provides another possibility. Duluth already participates in regional training, specialized response teams and a Metro SWAT operation. Additional cooperation with St. Louis County, Superior and nearby communities could reduce duplication in dispatch, fire investigation, hazardous-material response, training, fleet management and specialized equipment.
None of the reforms would be immediate. Changes involving staffing, overtime, callback pay and minimum crew levels would require collective bargaining. Regional consolidation could carry startup costs and provoke concern over local control.
Savings also would disappear if Duluth created civilian programs without reducing overtime, leaving vacancies unfilled or adjusting future police and fire staffing.
The choice is not simply between cutting public safety and preserving it unchanged. Duluth could instead reserve its most expensive emergency resources for calls that genuinely require them.
With personnel costs rising faster than city revenue, the question is no longer only how many police officers and firefighters Duluth can afford. It is also whether every call requires one.
