The real cost of a paper burn permit
The permit fee covers the paper. It doesn't cover the phone call, the drive to the hall, the binder, or the Saturday a captain spends telling people the ban is still on. Here's how to actually price a paper program.
3 min read
Ask a department what a burn permit costs and you'll get the fee: fifteen dollars, thirty, sometimes nothing at all. That's the price on the permit. It isn't the cost of the permit.
The cost is everything that has to happen between a resident deciding they want to burn brush and that permit existing. On paper, almost all of it is someone's time — and it's rarely the time of someone whose job is issuing permits.
Where the time actually goes
A paper program spends its time in five places. None of them are the permit itself.
| Step | Who does it | Typical time |
|---|---|---|
| Resident calls to ask if they need a permit | Whoever answers the phone | 4–6 min |
| Filling in the form at the counter | Admin or on-duty firefighter | 8–10 min |
| Taking payment, writing a receipt | Admin | 3–5 min |
| Filing the copy, updating the binder | Admin | 2–3 min |
| Answering "is the ban still on?" | Anyone at the hall | 2–4 min, repeatedly |
Call it twenty to thirty minutes of staff time per permit, spread across three or four people who all have another job. A department issuing 400 permits a season is spending something in the range of 150 to 200 hours on paperwork — most of it in the two weeks after the snow goes.
The busiest fortnight for permit paperwork is also the busiest fortnight for grass fires. That is not a coincidence, and it is the whole problem.
The part nobody counts
The five steps above are visible. Three costs aren't:
- The permits that never get issued. A resident who calls twice and gets voicemail burns anyway. That's not revenue lost, it's an unpermitted fire your crews don't know about.
- The renewals nobody chases. Seasonal permits expire quietly. On paper, nothing notices, so nothing gets renewed and the fee is simply never collected.
- The unpaid ones. Every department has a handful of permits issued on a promise to drop off a cheque. Some of those cheques exist.
None of these show up in a budget line. They show up as a permit program that costs more to run than it brings in, which is how a chief ends up being told the fee should go up.
What changes when it moves online
The steps don't disappear — they get done by the resident, on their phone, at nine on a Sunday night, which is when people actually decide to burn.
What's left for staff is the part that needs judgment: an agricultural burn that needs an inspection, an address the map can't place, a resident who genuinely needs a hand. The rest is a list you scan on Monday.
The fee stays whatever your bylaw says it is. The cost is what moves.
Working out your own number
You don't need a study. Take last season's permit count, multiply by twenty minutes, and divide by sixty. That's the hours. Put your own loaded hourly rate against it.
Then add the permits you didn't issue — the ones you know about because you got called to the fire.
That second number is usually the one that decides it.
- operations
- staff time
- revenue
- paper