How prepared are you or are your personnel for retirement? Have you consulted with a financial planner to establish a retirement plan or are you gambling that your pension and/or 401K investments will provide all of your financial necessities for retirement? Until a few years ago I was placing my entire retirement stake on my pension and 401K investments. After I began to work with a financial planner, my view and plan drastically changed.

As a probationary firefighter, I was advised to consult a senior department member who also was recognized as a firehouse retirement expert. He advised me to begin investing the maximum amount of funding that our 401K plan would allow. He counseled me that if I invested the 401K ceiling amount over my career, I could have a comfortable standard of living on retirement. He further explained that the benefit of a deferred compensation plan would be realized after I retired because I would be in a lower federal tax bracket during retirement. This expert understood the concept of compounded interest and was able to live a very comfortable life when he himself retired. Although his advise was a great initial retirement plan, it was not the most advantageous method to accumulate retirement wealth.

Career firefighters are in a unique position to plan for retirement due with pension systems. The benefit of tax deferral plans may be minimized for most firefighters if their pension plan is substantial.

For example, the State of Arizona Public Safety Personnel Retirement System provides 50% of the top three earning years for 20 years of service and a 2.5% increase every year to a maximum of 80% at 32 years of service. The current deputy chief pay in Maricopa County is $77,644–$107,049. This will place most deputy chiefs in the 2006 federal tax rate of 25%. If a deputy chief maintains the top end of this pay scale for three years and retires with 32 years of service, he or she will retire in the same tax bracket as just before retirement. This also does not include any deferred compensation earnings, which will be taxed on withdrawal, or standard increases in pay that should occur due to performance or cost of living.

If a firefighter began deferring the maximum amount of funding on day one of their employment, he or she could accrue $500,000 to $1 million over the course of a 32-year career. Unfortunately this was one piece of advice from the retirement expert that I did not heed!

If a deputy chief chose to withdraw 8% per year of the maximized deferred compensation account — which would not affect the principle but would draw on a standard rate of interest the funds would be accruing — he or she would move to the 28% tax bracket. This is a great investment plan for the federal government, as you will be taxed at a higher rate and accumulated monetary value. Does this sound correct?

Both the retirement expert and the deferred compensation account representative advised me that the benefit to “deferring” my taxation was to withdraw my retirement funding when I would be taxed at a lower rate. Ric Edelman, a professional financial adviser illustrates this fact in his book, The New Rules of Money:

Thus, millions of Americans adopted the attitude that if they deferred income from the present to the future, they‘d accumulate more money, and if they waited until retirement to spend it, they‘d also pay less in taxes. None of this is true anymore…. With only five brackets for all taxpayers, it is highly unlikely that you will move from one bracket to another, even when you retire.

Strategic planning should be applied to your retirement planning efforts. If you aren’t working with a financial planner, do so immediately. A deferred compensation plan can be a huge asset in your planning effort, but with proper financial advice it should fulfill only one component of your retirement plan — do you want to pay now or pay later?

As Sen. Jack Reed once said: “The president has no real plan to address the fiscal challenges arising from the retirement of the Baby Boom generation, let alone a plan to fix Social Security.”

What is your organizational definition of strategy? Is it based on emergency response or administrative concepts? Until recently, my organization, like many others, was focused on a definition of strategy that was used only in conjunction with fireground tactics. I am not professing that strategy is not used in my organization on a daily basis by my fire chief when working in political situations, or even by my fellow administrative chief officers when attempting to accomplish a goal that is paramount to the success of their division. I am stating that, if questioned, many of the personnel from my organization would have correlated the definition of strategy and its implementation only to an emergency response application.

A paradigm shift. A change in our organizational application of strategy and more specifically strategic planning was necessitated by the construction of two major sporting venues in our jurisdiction. The first of the sporting venues is the Jobing.com Arena, which has a maximum seating capacity of 17,500, and second is the University of Phoenix Stadium, which can contain 73,000. Additionally, the University of Phoenix Stadium previously has hosted the 2007 Fiesta Bowl and 2007 Bowl Championship Series, and next year it will host the Fiesta Bowl and Super Bowl XLII. The introduction of these events has forced us to begin planning strategically for our service delivery at not only the venues during major events, but also throughout our jurisdiction before, during and after the events.

A role model to follow. The Phoenix Fire Department, with we share a contiguous border to the east, has developed a planning section within the organization. We have been fortunate to receive the spoils of their progressive nature not only with our recent need to develop special event plans, but also for a plethora of benefits that would take me an entire day to list since we entered the automatic aid system with the PFD more than 20 years ago.

PFD’s Planning Section not only has led us through the labyrinth of mega-event planning, but it has gently guided us through the complex and confusing intricacy of Incident Command System forms that are an enormous challenge for non-forest service personnel. Additionally, the PFD Planning Section has begun assisting fire departments in the Valley of the Sun to obtain I-300 and I-400 ICS Training. PFD is hosting the I-300 and I-400 ICS Training and providing all components of the course, including locations, materials, food and instructors. PFD is conducting the classes with nationally qualified Type I and II Incident Management Team personnel as instructors, providing a true learning environment for the students where real-life applications are integrated with the mandatory didactic information.

Everyday use. My organization successfully completed an accreditation re-evaluation in March. A mandatory component of the accreditation process is a strategic plan. After our accreditation review was completed, I attended a Center for Public Safety Excellence Standards of Cover (Basic) and Self-Assessment Workshop. I began to understand the process of completing annual reports for the accreditation process and the synergy that can be created by aligning a five-year strategic plan with the accreditation process. In this way, the fire chief has documentation that can support budgetary requests. If the requests are collaborated by the CPSE accreditation assessment, the fire chief now has validation by an outside agency that maintains their needs.

What is your strategy? Strategy and strategic planning should be applied in everyday administrative functions as well as on the fireground. If your organization is accredited through the CPSE, you can make your accreditation manager’s life easier by implementing and maintaining a strategic plan that aligns with your five-year accreditation review.

I will leave you with a quote on strategy from Sun Tzu: “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” Let me know what you think about strategy and your organization’s strategic application.

After receiving an invitation from FIRE CHIEF Editorial Director Janet Wilmoth to contribute to the magazine‘s new blog, I began to ponder my first topic. A corollary between my article Task Master in the March issue of FIRE CHIEF and the overarching challenge of managing technology for chief officers immediately surfaced as a central focus.

After selecting my topic, I began to contemplate how exactly I would create my blog. I have read a few blogs, but never created my own. I researched the term blog on the Internet and found that Wikipedia, although not recognized as an accredited scholarly website, identified some potential consequences of blogging, including the loss of employment due to negative descriptions of the author‘s organization and defamation or liability due to uncomplimentary images of individuals being portrayed. I am not concerned with any of these potential pitfalls because I have the support of my fire chief for participating in this forum (Thank you, Chief Burdick!), and I am confident that the editorial prowess of FIRE CHIEF magazine will keep me out of court. I also will admit that the only person who may be defamed by my blog entries will be me, which my wife will enjoy thoroughly!

At this point you may be wondering in what direction this diatribe is headed and how the control of technology is connected. I previously described searching the Internet for the definition of a blog, which is an example of how to use technology as an asset. I would like to express one word of caution. Although this forum can be an incredible resource of information, a person must be discriminating when selecting an Internet source. There are no “Internet Police” regulating the validity of sources.

Uses of technology

Chief Ronny J. Coleman best summarized the need for fire chiefs to manage technology in his book Going for Gold, when he recognized:

“The technomanager neither accepts nor rejects technology on its surface merit. Instead, he looks upon technology as a tool — a tool to get the job done, to improve productivity in the organization, or to modify working conditions within the organization. This is a task for the fire chief.”

Fire administrators should use technology such as Microsoft Outlook, personal digital assistants and tablet personal computers to increase their efficiency in completing tasks, which will result in increased internal and external customer service. I realize that an administrator‘s ability to use technology may be limited by budget constraints or lack of information technology support. However, I have observed more than one organization that possessed both sufficient funding and IT support to maximize technological advancement but failed to do so because of the organizational leadership‘s refusal to embrace technology.

Technology take-away

The purpose of this blog is to emphasize the need for fire administrators to manage technology in an effort to be successful. Technology is being used throughout the fire service. For example, the Center for Public Safety Excellence uses Microsoft SharePoint for the accreditation process.

I recently had the pleasure of attending a CPSE Standards of Cover (Basic) and Self-Assessment Workshop with Chief Martel Thompson. Chief Thompson used a great definition of efficiency: “Efficiency is doing things right.” I would challenge fire administrators to assess if their organizations are operating as efficiently as possible, and to ask themselves if they‘re managing technology, or is technology managing them?

Technology management and use is absolutely necessary in today‘s world. This contention is best summarized by Joseph Wood Krutch, who stated, “Technology made large populations possible; large populations now make technology indispensable.”