Lafayette Fire Department
LFD covers 54 square miles and 135,000+ residents from 14 stations, holds an ISO Class 2 rating, and answers better than ten thousand calls a year — most of which are not fires. It runs on $41.2M in FY 2025-26, and also administers the parish’s support for 7 volunteer departments in the unincorporated areas.
- 14
- fire stations
- 265
- uniformed firefighters
- $41.2M
- department budget, FY 2025-26
- 10.8K
- calls projected, FY 2025-26
Who runs it
Earl Borden
Fire Chief
The department runs three crews around the clock, with a minimum of three firefighters at each responding station. Beyond suppression it operates a rescue team, a hazardous materials team, and serves as the central agency for the Louisiana State Fire Marshal’s Urban Search and Rescue Regional Response Team 4. Its budget divides into Emergency Operations, Technical Operations, Parishwide Fire Protection, and Administration.
Most of what they do is medical
Nearly 40% of LFD’s calls have a medical component, and the department’s own performance measures show medical calls per 1,000 residents climbing every year while fire calls fall. That is the pressure behind the $48,000 budgeted this year for EMS sprinter vehicles — sending a small van instead of an engine to a medical call saves wear on apparatus and frees the truck for a fire.
Worth being clear about a local wrinkle: LFD responds to medical calls, but it does not run the ambulances. Emergency ambulance transport in Lafayette is handled by Acadian Ambulance, a private company headquartered here — so unlike many cities, “fire and EMS” are not one public department in Lafayette. What you see below is the fire department’s budget alone.
Where the money goes
$41,180,981 adopted for FY 2025-26, down 16.4% from $49,281,498 the year before — again a capital swing, following the completion of Station 6 and the training center roof.
- Personnel69.2%$28,501,651
Salaries, benefits, retirement, retiree health, accrued leave
- Capital outlay16.6%$6,843,805
Apparatus, station construction and renovation
- Parishwide fire protection8.2%$3,386,080
Pass-through support for the seven volunteer departments
- Operating4.9%$2,035,451
Purchased services, materials & supplies, miscellaneous
- Uninsured losses1.0%$413,994
Risk Management claims — self-insured liability
By division
- Emergency Operations76.4%$31,442,569
- Technical Operations11.6%$4,760,558
Communications, fire prevention, training
- Parishwide Fire Protection9.0%$3,714,160
- Administration3.1%$1,263,694
The full line items
| Expenditure | FY 2025-26 adopted |
|---|---|
| Personnel salaries | $19,139,671 |
| Capital outlay | $6,843,805 |
| Retirement system | $6,040,687 |
| External appropriations | $3,386,080 |
| Employee benefits | $2,390,292 |
| Materials & supplies | $1,018,301 |
| Purchased services | $973,764 |
| Accrued sick & annual leave | $622,053 |
| Uninsured losses | $413,994 |
| Retiree health insurance | $308,948 |
| Miscellaneous | $43,386 |
| Total | $41,180,981 |
The workload
| Fiscal year | Calls answered | Inspections | Basis |
|---|---|---|---|
| FY 2022-23 | 9,592 | 2,260 | actual |
| FY 2023-24 | 10,176 | 1,992 | actual |
| FY 2024-25 | 10,691 | 2,150 | estimated |
| FY 2025-26 | 10,800 | 2,400 | projected |
How the department grades itself
LFD’s own benchmarks, reported in the budget book. The response time measure is the share of calls reached within five minutes and twenty seconds.
| Measure | Benchmark | FY 23-24 actual | FY 24-25 est. | FY 2025-26 goal |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Response within 5 min 20 sec | — | 77% | 80% | 85% |
| Firefighters per 1,000 residents | 2 | 1.98 | 1.98 | 2.02 |
| Medical calls per 1,000 residents | 32 | 33.13 | 34.70 | 37.34 |
| Fire calls per 1,000 residents | 3.5 | 4.64 | 4.44 | 4.35 |
| Total responses per 1,000 residents | 66.35 | 75.37 | 79.19 | 80.00 |
Station capital work
| Project | Cost |
|---|---|
| Station 6 rebuild Complete — opened June 2025 | $3,391,453 |
| Station 13 improvements Funded in FY 2025-26 | $700,000 |
| Station 1 renovation Funded in FY 2025-26 | $475,000 |
| Station 5 Programmed for FY 2028 and FY 2029 | $10,600,000 |
What it plans for FY 2025-26
- Finish rolling iPads out to every fire apparatus, cutting dispatch notification time and expanding pre-fire planning.
- Renovate two stations to improve efficiency and reduce ongoing maintenance costs.
- Put $48,000 toward EMS sprinter vehicles so medical calls stop pulling engines off the line.
- Automate shift callbacks through the new records management system.
Ten years of spending and staffing
Appropriations excluding capital. Staffing sat flat at 285 positions for seven straight years before ticking up to 288 in 2024, while spending rose about 42%.
| Fiscal year | Appropriation | Salaries | Positions |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | $25,325,515 | $13,637,917 | 285 |
| 2018 | $25,898,400 | $13,619,647 | 285 |
| 2019 | $26,573,471 | $13,883,909 | 285 |
| 2020 | $27,175,555 | $13,988,733 | 285 |
| 2021 | $29,538,359 | $16,077,542 | 285 |
| 2022 | $31,300,517 | $16,436,153 | 285 |
| 2023 | $31,070,492 | $16,150,493 | 285 |
| 2024 | $35,510,725 | $17,975,844 | 288 |
| 2025 | $37,523,882 | $18,069,408 | 288 |
| 2026 | $35,940,615 | $17,773,100 | 288 |
The city department answers to the City Council; parishwide fire protection and the volunteer department subsidy run through the Parish Council. Both review their side of the budget in public each fall.
Budget figures are adopted appropriations for FY 2025-26 (November 1, 2025 – October 31, 2026) from Lafayette Consolidated Government’s adopted operating and five-year capital improvement budget, by department — Fire Department, Dept. 040, plus the capital improvement program for the station projects. Adopted means budgeted, not spent. Call volumes, inspection counts, performance measures, and departmental goals are the department’s own reporting as printed in that document. Station count, staffing, service area, ISO rating, and contact details come from LFD’s department page. We have not published a station-by-station address list because LCG does not publish one we can cite; we would rather leave it out than source it from a directory site. All LCG budget documents are posted at lafayettela.gov/budget. Spotted something off? Let us know.