Private fire departments are already saving local governments tons of money.
No, no they are not. Private fire departments will cost more in loses and problems to the community then save money.
History has shown that private protective public services fail because they have to be for profit.
But let us look at what the real numbers are.
To hire a fire protection for a medium size town, and be able get the cheapest (minimum wage) for your dollar it would cost 47,000 dollars per person, assuming the person worked 24 hours a day, 7 day a week, 365 days a year, this assumes that you would hire 4 people, to form 1 24 hour fire fighter.
Now you would need to have 30 firefighters (for fast response for large fires) on call very second of every day, of every year to equal the protection the volunteer. To get that kind of protection, you would need to get $1,410,000 a year, just to keep people around to tackle most of the problems for a medium size city. Most medium cities budget is about $1,000,000. So to offer minimum protection man hour wise for a medium size city, you would run past the budget by the city in just paying the people minimum wage.
How do they get around this in the public sector, volunteers, something that will not happen with private networks.
If you just google private sector fire protection, you will see where this will fail again and again.
Private sector can do a lot of great things, but in somethings, like public protection and transportation is not one of them.