§ 78.053.Liability

A borrowing provision, and it borrows an entire regime.

A nonprofit fire department is liable for damages described by the applicability section only to the extent that the governmental unit with which it is contracting would be liable under Chapter 101.

The department steps into the governmental unit's shoes. That imports the Tort Claims Act's narrow waiver, its damages caps, its exclusion of exemplary damages, and its seventeen exclusions — including the one for the failure to provide or the method of providing fire protection, which covers most of what a fire department is sued for.

The measure is the contracting unit's exposure, which matters because the caps differ by tier. A department contracting with a municipality gets the $250,000 and $500,000 figures; one contracting with another local government unit gets $100,000 and $300,000.

Subsection (b) imports the election of remedies as well: it applies to a claimant in a suit against a fire fighter as if the fire fighter were an employee of a governmental unit and the nonprofit fire department were a governmental unit.

So a claimant suing the department is immediately and forever barred from suing its fire fighters over the same subject matter, and one suing a fire fighter for scope-of-employment conduct must substitute the department within 30 days or be dismissed.

The chapter gives these departments the governmental position entire — the protections and the procedural machinery together.