Fire Chief

Fire and EMS organizations have a fiduciary responsibility to the people who pay the bills, be they taxpayers, donors or business sponsors. Whether an organization’s annual budget is $10,000 or $100 million, it is responsible for providing the best possible service for the dollar.

I was in Charleston, S.C., on the three-month anniversary of the fire that killed nine firefighters. That day Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr. gave his first report to the community. The report outlined the behavioral health and financial assistance to the fallen firefighters’ families and praised the Post-Incident Assessment and Enhancement Review Task Force that was brought in to assess the fire department and make recommendations to help bring the department into the current century.

Where will the fire service’s next generation of employees and members come from? The focus for many years has been recruiting women and minorities to reflect the community that a department serves. Today the challenge is how to attract and keep people from the newest pool of potential employees or volunteers: the members of Generation Y.

My previous comments come from the energy of having groups of people nationally networked in an e-mail group called ePARADE. The ePARADE group is a simple Yahoo group composed of more than 400 fire marshals and fire and life-safety professionals who originally got together and identified a communication gap among fire marshals.

Many U.S. fire and EMS organizations use some form of the 24-hour shift for around-the-clock staffing, but that may soon be changing for both employers and employees. Changes may stem from employee safety and decision-making capabilities while working 24-hour shifts, organizational liability for actions by employees working 24-hour shifts, and changes in worker attitudes about work schedules in general.

The U.S. work force is undergoing some serious seismic shifts, not because the earth is shifting, but because the demographics of the available labor pool are changing drastically. This is particularly true for fire and EMS agencies.

The Arizona Fire Chiefs Association Conference was a hot one — 113°F hot, and exactly like what you’d expect July in Arizona to feel like.

The five days of programs were geared toward the more than 330 chiefs and officers and officers in attendance, with a group of young fire cadets listening in the back and waiting to assist. The group was intense and energized, seemingly solar-powered by the Arizona sunshine.

A group of probationary firefighters got me to reflect on how much they had left to learn, how much they had to learn from first-hand experience, and how much I had learned from those who took the time to teach me.

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.

In late 1999, a Glendale (Ariz.) Fire Department battalion chief named Jim Gibson went to the fire chief and asked him if we wanted to pursue a new process: accreditation. The fire chief had asked Jim to develop a strategic plan; I was a captain at the time and volunteered to help develop the plan.