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I have been managing a project dealing with the needs and requirements of public safety communications in Montana for the last year. One interesting point on volunteers came out that may be specific to rural states like Montana.
Getting and keeping volunteers is problemantic in some areas regardless of the service whether it be SAR, fire, EMS, etc. The reasoning that came out was based on this area being a depressed economy that has not kept up with the cost of living.
-More people having to work farther from home (comute too far to respond during work hours),
-Work extra jobs,
-Spouse has to work now to keep up
-These all result in home needs coming before volunteering,
-No time to train or respond,
-Cost of volunteering is going up.
-Training required costs money that is not available (personally as well as organizationally.),
-Requirements for training keep increasing for liability and profesionalism reasons,
-Public perception of response keeps going up requiring more effort to respond.
-New-comers that arrive from somewhere else that depended on all paid public service and they have no concept of volunteering themselves.
All of this in an environment that has relied very heavily on volunteers to complete the public safety response picture (similar to the rural east coast ethics.) This is impacting our commmunities due to our low population densities of 800,000 people spread out over 145,000 sq. miles.
Ron Haraseth
Lewis & Clark Search and Rescue Assn.
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Volunteerism Trends 
Turnover Rate
(David R. Tate)
trends have been long term
, 1997, May 09
