the supply of municipal services in terms of such factors as wage costs, population density, personal income, and city area. In general, these attempts compare a service in several municipalities and rely on statistical analysis to uncover significant relationships between provision of the service and various factors under investigation. In most studies that develop statistical models, however, little attention is directed towards the particular operating characteristics of the service being examined. Moreover, in different cities, a given service may be rendered in different ways, making the development of comparable service measures, and consequently inter-city comparison, difficult. This paper reviews the provision of municipal fire suppression service. It attempts to avoid the difficulties inherent in inter-city comparisons by examining the service provided to different sectors of one city and relating the differing levels of service to the differing levels of fire incidence, population density and fire hazard in those sectors. In the first part of this paper a general cost/ benefit-framework is presented for the supply of fire suppression service to one sector. Then it is shown how the single sector formulation can be transformed into a multi-sector distribution framework that is more amenable to empirical verification. Finally, the results are applied to a study of fire suppression service distribution in New York City. The emphasis in this study is on the description of an existing allocation.