SHUTESBURY — Continued staffing challenges for small-town fire departments that depend on on-call and volunteer firefighters to respond to emergencies is prompting officials in Shutesbury, Leverett, Wendell and New Salem to examine ways to potentially regionalize their departments and share resources.

The Shutesbury Selectboard voted unanimously last week to apply to the state’s Community Compact Best Practice grant program so the Edward J. Collins Jr. Center for Public Management at the University of Massachusetts Boston, which recently completed a first-phase study for the four departments, can continue its work and refine its recommendations.

The first phase, paid for with a $20,000 Community Compact grant obtained by Leverett and supplemented by $5,000 from the Franklin Regional Council of Governments, outlines options for the next phase of work. Among those options to study are:

■Having two regional full-time firefighter/EMTs with shared responsibilities for inspections, training, prevention and outreach, in addition to fire and emergency medical response.

■Having two full-time regional administrative fire prevention, outreach and inspection officers responsible for coordinating and tracking training for all department members in the four towns, and for conducting all required inspections in the four towns.

■Having a shared fire chief to serve two or more of the participating towns.

“The project team feels that there is a significant opportunity for the towns of Leverett, Shutesbury, Wendell and New Salem to pursue one or more of the established recommendations, particularly around shared staff,” reads the initial 22-page report, written by Becca Meekins, public services manager at the Collins Center, and Stephen Foley, an associate at the Collins Center.

Leverett Fire Chief Brian Cook said the preliminary evaluation comes amid growing challenges of hiring staff and getting more on-call firefighters trained and on board in the four towns, whose total population is 5,516. “The big thing, out of all four departments, staffing is the largest issue by far,” Cook said.

The departments are led by full-time chiefs: Cook in Leverett, Leonard Czerwonka in Shutesbury, and Joe Cuneo, who oversees both New Salem and Wendell. “Other than those three people for the four towns, there’s no guaranteed coverage during the day,” Cook explained.

The report, provided to Leverett Town Administrator Marjorie McGinnis on Aug. 9, provides an overview of the situation, including possible changes to federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration rules that could be incorporated into the state Board of Fire Prevention Regulations and updates to the Massachusetts Comprehensive Fire Safety Code.

“Recent proposed OSHA regulations would set new standards for protecting emergency responders from a variety of occupational hazards,” Meekins and Foley write. “This well-intentioned regulation will unfortunately have significant financial and administrative impacts on small call/volunteer fire/EMS departments.”

The report also shows that, aside from the chiefs, the towns combined relied on fewer than 40 on-call firefighters to respond to emergencies last year.

The initial recommendations require additional study, such as identifying where the borders of the towns overlap, the potential to share personnel and resources such as a regional record data management system and joint procurement of tablets for inspections, response data and water supply locations, and how to have someone work for the departments who might take some of the tasks off the chiefs, such as inspections.

Cost projections are provided for various options, such as adding $150,000 to the budgets of the four towns to hire two full-time firefighter/EMTs.

Cook said Phase 1 involved a lot of data collection, examining financials, response data, staffing and training. The next phase, he continued, will do “an analysis using GIS mapping, look at response data, look at staffing models.”

Public input will also be a significant aspect of the next phase, as well as determining what sort of governance model might work should the four towns work together, Cook said. A task force would have representatives from each town to guide the report and any recommendations.

Shutesbury Town Administrator Becky Torres said different fire department models have pros and cons. The study should be seen as exploratory, and while it could lead to major changes, the towns are also responding to the possibility that new state regulations could be debilitating to small-town firefighting.

Torres added there has been a similar concern about how small towns are affected by the state rules around training and hiring part-time police officers.

“Hopefully it won’t be as dire as people are projecting now,” Torres said.

Scott Merzbach can be reached at smerzbach@gazettenet.com.