Late last year, Fire Chief Brandon Frazier was bracing for the worst.

Fire trucks were broken down, equipment couldn’t be repaired or maintained, fuel costs were rising, and lights were malfunctioning at the station and in the vehicles. All of these problems increased the danger for staff going on calls. 

Over the past decade, as nearby Colony Ridge attracted an estimated 75,000 new residents to the department’s service area and increased annual runs by 20 times, the Plum Grove Volunteer Fire Department had reached the brink of financial collapse.

“I was on the clock before we had to start shutting our doors because no financial changes had been made,” Frazier recalled.

In 2019, Frazier proposed that Liberty County establish an emergency services district, which could fund the department through property taxes to ensure it would not run out of money. Frazier advocated for two separate plans in 2020 and 2022 but each was rejected by the Liberty County Commissoners Court.

The 50-plus year volunteer department, which relies heavily on donations, was preparing to close in Decemeber 2023 when John and William “Trey” Harris, Colony Ridge’s co-owners, stepped in with a two-year $360,000 donation. 

They wanted to ensure the department, which serves a 55-square-mile fire district including the city of Plum Grove and Colony Ridge, remains operational, and so did Frazier.

The fire chief is aware the development has been sued by the federal government and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, but all of their agreements have been above board.

“It’s not money under the table in a briefcase,” he said. “There’s donation receipts, there’s checks. These are all trackable.”

In addition to the $15,000 monthly gift, the development also built a second fire station inside Colony Ridge.

A collaboration with Colony Ridge

The question of what happens after 2025 still plagues the fire chief.

Frazier believes the department should align itself with Colony Ridge. He has drafted a 20-year fire protection plan for the development’s municipal management district (MMD), a taxing entity that represents about half of the 33,000-acre development, to review and approve.

The proposal encourages Colony Ridge to contract with the department to fund firefighting services with a portion of the property and sales tax dollars the district collects, according to a draft copy of the plan.

In the meantime, the department is changing its name from the Plum Grove Volunteer Fire Department to the West Liberty County Fire & Rescue to better reflect all of the residents it serves. It’s a process that has infuriated some local Plum Grove residents who argue the department should stop running on calls outside of the city.

The longtime fireman, paramedic and police officer tries to practice patience, Frazier said. This is a volunteer gig after all. 

“All I can do is try,” he said.

When Frazier’s not in Liberty County, he’s an hour north in Livingston, Texas, serving as the assistant chief of police for the Alabama-Coushatta Tribe of the Texas Police Department.

It’s hard to focus on the future while navigating this new relationship with Colony Ridge, managing attrition and maintaining vehicles and equipment — all for a job he doesn’t get paid for — but Frazier believes in the spirit of the volunteer fire service.

“It was important to me to secure the future of this place,” he said. “Because if we do nothing, we eventually drown and die.”

‘A numbers game’

In 1971, when the department was established, the fire district consisted of miles and miles of trees. In 2013, Frazier estimates the department served about 600-800 residents mostly from Plum Grove.

“It’s a numbers game,” Frazier said. “We knew the day would come. It was never gonna stay trees forever.”

However, population growth and call increases haven’t changed the way Liberty County funds the department, which is allocated roughly $5,000-$7,000 every month, about $60,000-$84,000 a year, through a fire protection reimbursement agreement. 

While the department is also reimbursed for housing the county’s contracted emergency service, Allegiance EMS, and receives a $400 monthly donation from Colony Ridge’s property owner’s association, without the two-year $360,000 contribution from the development the department wouldn’t exist, Frazier said.

“We used to live off of BBQ fundraisers, chill-cookoffs in the way-back days,” Frazier said. “Now, the world’s more expensive. People are just trying to get by, and it's affected the fire service itself.”

Membership has plummeted and the average age of a firefighter is “fixin’ to graduate from high school,” he said.

James Autrey, the assistant fire chief, explained that the department has to manage with the few resources they’re provided. 

He said the department recently earned an insurance rating of 5/5x from the Insurance Services Office and the Texas State Fire Marshal’s Office, which means homeowners within a 5 mile radius from each of the department’s fire stations can potentially lower their property insurance rates.

“This area has always been the red-headed stepchild of the county,” Autrey said. “We’ve put a lot of work into the last 15 years. Superseded a lot of the departments in the county — paid or unpaid.”

On the clock

Arms folded, leaning against the department’s booster pick-up truck during a Sunday morning shift in late September, Frazier sighed.

Ten members left the department after May’s massive flooding, the derecho and Hurricane Beryl overwhelmed the area.

“You’re helping people during these disasters, but nobody ever asks you, ‘How did your house fare?’” Frazier said. “You’re doing your job, tending to everyone’s else’s bad day and your bad day isn’t allowed to be a factor.”

The department has a total of 28 volunteers on staff now, but at its peak, it had up to 70 members. 

Still, the department runs a tight ship. Each staffer is required to spend a total of 48 hours at one or both of the stations a month and each station has at least two volunteers on every 12-hour shift.

In Autrey’s case, it’s often a family affair.

While driving over to the station in Colony Ridge, the assistant fire chief explained that his son, Lt. Joseph Autrey, graduated from the department’s junior program in high school and slowly convinced his mom, Crystal Autrey, to become an EMT and join the department, and later his dad.

The morning has been suspiciously quiet, even for a Sunday. The assistant fire chief suspects everyone’s still at church.

Around 11:30 a.m. later that morning, father and son duo blinked through sweat as the elder Autrey led his son, Lt. Curtis Lambert, and a junior program volunteer through a series of training exercises designed to help everyone feel more comfortable when they are dispatched to a scene.

Medical calls make up 40 percent of all of West Liberty County Fire & Rescue runs and were the No. 1 type of incident the department has responded to between 2021-2023, according to incident reports. But in the past two years, fires have increased by 11 percent, outpacing accidents as the second-most common emergency.

The younger Autrey unfurled a series of hoses from the tanker and snaked each across an empty parking lot inside the development’s Santa Fe subdivision.

“The fire service is always evolving,” the assistant chief said with a grin. “Otherwise we’d be carrying buckets like Benjamin Franklin set up.”

“I ain’t carrying no buckets today,” his son said, shooting water parallel to a Subway restaurant, as his father ratcheted up the pressure building inside the water tank. “I got a hose!”

Fire service’s future

Frazier and Autrey maintain their embattled sense of optimism in spite of an ever-mounting series of challenges.

Seated side-by-side at their desks, the chiefs trade jabs in the early afternoon of their Sunday shift. 

But the conversation keeps drifting back to a single question: Is Colony Ridge spreading them too thin?

“Well,” Frazier said with a laugh. “If you want guaranteed coverage, it’s more helpful to pay.”

That two-year deal and the promise of future collaboration with the development has eased some of the fire chief’s apprehensions.

“I can’t make John Harris do anything,” he said. “All we can do is make recommendations.”

The department has a long and storied set of traditions. As it evolves to include Colony Ridge alongside Plum Grove, Frazier is determined to stay out of politics.

“We don’t want to abandon the history of the Plum Grove Volunteer Fire Department, we want it to survive forever,” Frazier said. “But we also, like any fire department that survives, have to be able to change with the times and appropriately represent and meet the needs of the people we serve.”

Correction: A previous version of this article stated the West Liberty County Fire and Rescue is allocated $5,000-$7,000 a year from Liberty County. The department receives $5,000-$7,000 a month from the county, or about $60,000-$84,000 a year.

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