# Fire company finances

What the volunteer fire and rescue companies of Clarke County reported on their annual IRS returns: revenue, expenses and year-end position, one row per company-year.

- Dataset ID: `fire-company-finances`
- Tier: 2 (Topical)
- Version: 1.0.0
- Publication date: 2026-09-17
- Records: 43
- License: [Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) (CC BY 4.0)
- Source of truth: https://ourclarke.com/transparentclarke/fire-companies/

## Coverage

- In: 43 company-years, fiscal 2011 to 2025, for the 3 surviving volunteer fire and rescue companies of Clarke County, Virginia, from their Form 990 and 990-EZ returns. 16 rows were read from the filed return; the rest come from ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer's summary of the IRS data.
- Not in: 2 company-years with no filing located in the sources checked, which carry no figures. Returns before fiscal 2011. Revenue and expense categories, gaming, fundraising events and county budget figures shown on the fire page. Figures for Shenandoah Farms Volunteer Fire Department, which closed in 2013, and for the county's own fire and rescue department.
- Effective date: 2025-12-31

## Source

IRS Form 990 and 990-EZ returns of the Clarke County fire and rescue companies. From IRS Form 990 and 990-EZ filings. https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/form-990-series-downloads

Source file SHA-256: `2edc81e831d7c216b2ee301faa8389117fb12f53632757cb2835033c3e4e98d1`

Attribution: The returns are public records; each row cites its filing in source_url and source_citation. Where a row's figures come from ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer, source_url names it.

## Files

| File | Format | Size | Rows | SHA-256 |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| [fire-company-finances-2026-09-17.csv](fire-company-finances-2026-09-17.csv) | CSV | 24,879 bytes | 43 | `870325419c1c8387e905aa10308e79ed6f90d4731f73e99054d18b810f3f419d` |

Column definitions are in [schema.md](schema.md). Machine-readable metadata is in [datapackage.json](datapackage.json). Every file in this directory, with its size and SHA-256, is listed in [manifest.json](manifest.json).

## Held fields

- revenue and expense categories: Contributions, program revenue, gaming, fundraising events and natural expense categories are on the fire page. This first version carries the totals, functional split and year-end position only; the categories can be appended as columns in a later version.
- revenue less expenses: The page works this out from two reported lines. It is not a reported figure, so the download does not carry it; subtract expenses from revenue.
- county budget observations: County figures are money proposed or appropriated for a fiscal year, not money spent, and do not belong beside what a company reported on its own return.

## Row filters

Every row passed the download boundary's two filters before it was written: rows about a person who may be living are excluded, and rows whose state is unresolved (verify, lead, ambiguous and similar) are excluded. This publication excluded 0 rows as possibly living and 0 as unresolved at that boundary.

## Reading the data

An empty amount means the figure is not held for that year, or was not read from that return. It is never zero; a reported zero is written as 0. Amounts are US dollars as the source gives them: whole dollars, except where a figure read from a return PDF prints cents.

evidence_basis says where each row's figures come from. A summary row has not been checked line by line against the return.

A 990-EZ does not report the functional expense split, so those columns are empty for 990-EZ years.

Company totals are not county spending, and no total across the three companies means anything.

## How to cite

Our Clarke. "Fire company finances." Dataset, version 1.0.0, published 2026-09-17. From IRS Form 990 and 990-EZ filings. https://ourclarke.com/data/#fire-company-finances. License: CC BY 4.0.

## Versions

Each publication is dated in its filenames. Earlier publications are kept unchanged at https://ourclarke.com/data/snapshots/.