CHARLESTON — Bingo once kept volunteer fire units in the chips, but as other players moved in on them, the cash cow dried up, and Sen. Mike Green thinks the Legislature needs to examine the games to see if they’re above board.

Green was motivated Monday by Fire Marshal Sterling Lewis’ remark that some private bingo operations are breaking the law.

“We have bingo that is as illegal as moonshine on Main Street,” Lewis told Select Committee F on volunteer departments at its organizational meeting.

When he served in the Beaver Volunteer Fire Department, Lewis pointed out, bingo provided two-thirds of its $1.2 million budget.

But the times have changed, and bingo no longer is the reliable source of income, Green pointed out.

“Why not charge this committee with looking at those (bingo) regulations,” Green, D-Raleigh, suggested, given the huge amounts VFDs once took in to keep their operations in the black.

Money has become a major problem for volunteer units, and with 447 of them in service across the state, as opposed to 11 paid departments, the situation has become what Lewis and others termed as “critical.”

Lewis said his agency isn’t the one to examine whether some bingo operations that are draining money from VFDs are functioning within the law.

Green recalled how the Bradley-Prosperity VFD once thrived largely on bingo revenues, at a time when an overflow crowd found some patrons parked along the road.

“At some point in time, why not say, ‘Let’s look at the requirements, look at the regulations in bingo,’” Green told Lewis. “If you’re saying it’s being done illegally, we need to start addressing that issue.”

But Tom Miller, a veteran member of the Sissonville VFD, told Green that bingo money isn’t the answer to the fiscal woes confronting the state’s volunteers.

“We need a permanent solution,” he said. “Not a quick fix.”

One problem is that workers’ compensation benefits could be paid under BrickStreet’s proposal at the minimum wage level, even though he and some fellow firefighters hold jobs that pay considerably more, Miller said.

“I’m not going to endanger my family’s stability for free,” the Sissonville firefighter told the committee.

Recruiting and retaining firefighters to work as unpaid volunteers has become a major difficulty, and one difficulty has been the changing times, officials said.

Put simply, there are too many diversions to occupy firefighters when off from private jobs, as opposed to the simple recreational outlets available decades ago.

When he broke in several years ago, recalled Chuck Runyon, a member of the State Fire Commission, “We had a black-and-white TV and played pinochle in the back.”

Lewis sought to demonstrate how important volunteer units are to a rural state such as West Virginia where they far outnumber paid departments.

A study performed nine years ago in Raleigh County showed that if taxpayers had been charged for services provided by the 13 units, the total bill would have been a whopping $14 million, the fire marshal said.

Lewis had his own suggestion for retaining firefighters — create a “Hero’s Scholarship” patterned after the PROMISE one as a means of enticing them to stay with their departments.

Sam Love, a lobbyist with the West Virginia Firemen’s Association and former volunteer firefighter himself, said he hoped the formation of a special interims panel will lead to some positive steps in the 2009 session.

“Each year, we put in bills and bills, and they never seem to get anywhere,” Love said.

If nothing is done for the volunteers, he warned, look for homeowners’ insurance premiums to go up.

Miller agreed that the situation is worsening for VFDs across the state, noting that their rosters have dwindled by some 1,000 of late.

“This is serious,” he added.