Firing the Fire Board – Part Deux
God grant us all mercy
This is part II, an update if you will, of my last essay concerning the abrupt and unusual termination of a local fire chief with nearly 40 years of exemplary volunteer service in a very rural district here in the Pacific Northwest. If you haven’t read the first essay, I humbly suggest you start there before reading on:
Firing The Fire Board
This is an essay about the termination of a local fire chief with nearly 40 years of exemplary volunteer service, and how it appears to mirror the larger, significantly global symptoms of growing ineptitude and irresponsibility in ‘representative’ government.
Try as I may, the event horizon of this colossal mess in our fire district has denied my attention moving elsewhere these last weeks; the required escape velocity exceeds my energy budget. I am helplessly caught in its hideous suction – the absolute vacuum of the ongoing malfeasance is now stripping even the lead paint off toys in mainland China.
Within the last weeks since the local fire board rushed from suspending to outright terminating the volunteer status of our local fire chief, the balance of trained and experienced volunteers announced extended leaves of absence. A few that remained announced their LOA’s soon after the board’s immediate Spanish inquisition into the whereabouts of turn-out gear ended up in the board itself misplacing gear that was turned in. It wasn’t long before one of the newly trained volunteers (one of the few who remained) arrived on the scene of an injury MVA without turn-outs. Naturally, as these things tend to go, both vehicles caught fire while he was on-scene. That firefighter then expressed significant concerns about the capability of the board to exercise its newfound authority in operations in a safe and trustworthy fashion.
Did you just read that the board has taken over fire department operations? Yes, yes you did.
In a 5-0 vote, the board unanimously granted themselves the privilege and authority to dabble in the operations side of the fire district – something that is both terribly dangerous for the district and ruinous to the staffing and morale of the all-volunteer department. As noted earlier, none of the sitting board members have any of the required certifications, training or experience to run fire district operations.
Historically, civilian fire boards tend to be low on qualifications and necessarily narrow in scope and mission – yet boards are responsible for fire department policies covering budget, purchases for such things as apparatus and equipment, along with real estate, capital projects and inter-agency matters. Boards typically appoint their fire chiefs, but they must rely upon that chief’s expertise to direct and inform their decisions to be in alignment with life-safety priorities. Still, many chiefs experience the often painfully frustrating second-guessing by civilian boards that don’t understand the difference between life-safety and having a nice community center, much less the often-complex reasons for certain training or selecting certain equipment. Like when specifying a two-stage pump over a single stage pump for a new truck.
Even when a qualified and experienced chief is present, civilian boards lacking direct fire service experience are causing headaches across the country. In some eastern US fire districts, the scope of the board’s authority extends over everything – operations included – this has left dozens of mixed and all-volunteer departments over-equipped and grossly understaffed. To put it in simpler terms, the job of a successful fire board is doing whatever is reasonable and responsible to keep and maintain both qualified staff and operational equipment for the needs of the community within the budget they’re provided.
Read: Not to interfere or micromanage. But then there’s this place…
At present, the good citizens of our district are almost completely at the mercy and goodwill of the three closest neighboring districts, the closest of which has recently been significantly hobbled by the resignation of their chief (more on this later).
In order to help identify but preserve reasonable anonymity, we’ll label these neighboring districts Shakespeare, Money and Fog. The closest district (Shakespeare) is to the west is 12 miles away, the next closest is to the northeast (Fog) some 20 miles away through mostly hilly and winding roads, and the next closest district on the southeast side (Money) is just a firehose short of 25 miles – a mostly uphill climb. (Try rapidly lugging 3,000 gallons of water up these hills sometime.)
The significant delays that these increased distances represent may end up being measured in lives and homes before this is all over. As one might expect, the board’s venture into actual operations has been fraught with the kind of bungling one might expect from children playing with a delicate and dangerous toy.
So far, the board’s operational priorities have been focused solely on taking equipment inventory and looking into the financial books in a transparently obvious search to find anything with which to paint the fired fire chief in a negative light. The board complained to a local newspaper who were equally happy and eager to paint this underfunded district as one that is poorly run and failing, using a picture of a mothballed, hand-me-down truck with its dented door as the headline’s trophy photo. The smear campaign continues with each subsequent meeting; most recently by reaching out to OSHA in an attempt to get the ex-chief in trouble over a nearly 8-month-old complaint that had been resolved. The board has also threatened him and the other volunteers with law enforcement searches of their residences for ‘missing’ district property. One volunteer received a response to an inquiry about maintaining old positions should any of them decide to return to service. The boards’ response reads like a Stasi commandant’s reply to an escaped prisoner:
…You will be subject to disciplinary action …you will not be commuted to your old position …your certifications will be removed…
Not that the district is desperate for trained, experienced firefighters and EMT’s mind you.
What is clear, at least to this ex-firefighter, is that the two lifelong academics running this …show… are textbook examples of the Dunning-Kruger effect – an effect prevalent in today’s illustrious DEI-infested academia. It’s defined as a cognitive bias where individuals operating in a particular domain overestimate their knowledge and abilities. In effect, they don’t know enough about running fire department operations to recognize their own incompetence. None of the firefighters in the district want to return to service under grossly feckless leadership and direction, especially in view of facing the loss of hard-earned positions, certifications, silly administrative reprimands and ‘disciplinary action’ from clearly incompetent, power-abusing civilian clowns.
I personally spoke with the chairwoman during an open house a little over a week ago. My sincere interest was and remains, what was the urgency? Why the rush to suspend, then terminate not 3 days later?
Please help me...us… understand.
Why was the emergency board meeting 1-day notice posted the very same day when the chief’s family (and all of the districts nearby) were grieving for the loss of the chief’s father-in-law? Her immediate response was that she and others on the board were ‘not well pleased’ with my social media posts. I explained that’s understandable, but the appearances and optics here from their own actions are beyond the pale – it’s a smoking, burning lava crater and a train wreck inside. Their allusions to ‘other reasons’ fall short of expected transparency to the public, especially given that the now ex-chief publicly waived all of his privacy rights during the proceedings. He wanted full disclosure and had nothing to hide. The opposite appears to be true for the board who continue to hold a string of emergency, Zoom-only meetings. Meetings in open defiance of Oregon Public Meeting Laws; no public-comment, wholly remote meetings where everyone but them are muted and there are no opportunities to voice concerns. Additionally, they have shut-down all public comment: banned and suspended dozens of residents from the official Facebook group that is linked from the official web page and deleted all posts and comments not supportive of the board’s ongoing smear campaign and false narrative.
The community has asked for transparency, not transparently irresponsible.
One of the more salient, larger issues that many citizens may not be aware of is that the majority of fire fighters and EMTs in this country are volunteers – some 54% according to the US Fire Administration’s 2020 statistical archive. Notably, only 34% are career (paid) firefighters and 12 percent are paid-per-call firefighters. These are important figures to bear in mind, because of the apparent gap in understanding demonstrated by fire boards across the country. Departments cannot be operated like federal gulags.
Still, the professional expectations are the same regardless of the presence or absence of pay; paid and volunteer alike must demonstrate and maintain skills and proficiencies that are often strenuous, difficult to achieve and hard to keep. Employee retention is always a troublesome task even in the larger and better funded departments with paid staff. The sharp decline of volunteers is being felt and noticed everywhere. Now consider this tiny fire district; fairly remote by any measure, populated by less than 800 residents who are burdened with staffing, operating, and funding an all-volunteer fire department with less than $80,000 a year. If response times slip (and they are) our ISO rating slips. This equates to paying much higher fire-insurance for everyone in the district. Obviously, the insurance rates will matter to those who renew them, but more importantly, is the real, material peril the residents of the district now face with an understaffed, mostly untrained group. A group that must rely on outside agencies if anything serious happens. All for the stated high crime of working for free on an un-funded building construction project without a county permit.
Today I spoke with the neighboring fire chief of the Shakespeare district who just recently announced he is stepping down from being chief. I am very familiar with and have worked with this gentleman who is highly regarded throughout the county. Of concern is that his capable and experienced leadership coupled with the absence of our chief’s presence has left a lunar-sized crater in all emergency service responses in the general area (remember, our board is heavily relying upon neighboring districts for services.) Shakespeare’s fire board in contrast to our own is a good group of folks who realize and understand the gravity of making poor decisions. They, as with the rest of the surrounding communities, are utterly dismayed that their own chief is stepping down.
The reason?
There are many – none of which are singularly at cause – but he stated that one of the top five reasons was the recent actions taken by our district board. His concern is over what they have done to our chief – whom he deeply respects – could happen to him if even one minor thing goes wrong. All the years of careful, methodical practice in a high-risk, high-stress and high-responsibility position could be up-ended and cave-in on him. As he stated to me, “It’s bad enough being an unpaid volunteer, but being a chief is no job to undertake as a volunteer, especially in light of what [our] fire board has done to our chief.”
As few may appreciate, the burdens and responsibilities of a fire chief are uniquely challenging. Chiefs assume full and total responsibility for accident scenes, scenes of structure fires, MCI’s, you name it. They are wholly accountable for the safety of their responders, for their training, readiness and the condition and operational readiness of all equipment and apparatus. Many if not all of the responders are people they know and care for; they’ve been to their homes, helped them with vehicle and home repairs, been there at their kid’s graduations and mourned with them when they lost friends and family members. It is not any small concern when these same people they know, and love are out facing dangerous situations under their direction.
Should anything go wrong, it is the chief that must answer. It is the chief who is accountable for the safe operations in dangerous environments such as wildfires, hidden, exploding propane containers in structure fires, and the toxic smoke from vehicle fires and mobile meth labs. It is the chief who the alphabet-agencies will come after to answer why the SCBA’s were 3 months out of testing, or the apparatus with 15-year-old tires was allowed to run; it is the chief who will be questioned over the failure to train to the often bizarre and costly new regulations that pour out of these same agencies every year. It is these volunteer chiefs that not only put on the white hats at fire scenes and MVA’s, but who put on the carpenter’s belt at the station, the mechanics overalls underneath the trucks, the accountants’ glasses stretching the few pennies into copper wire, and the counselor’s robes when consoling traumatized volunteers.
It is all these things and more, and as the chief of the Shakespeare district noted in his public letter of resignation, it’s not just the men and women who volunteer that make sacrifices, it’s also their families; in the lost time together, in the sudden interruptions of dinners, parties and quiet evenings, in the countless lonely hours of their children wondering if Mom or Dad will return safely from the big fire, and in seeing them sometimes tormented by the never ending carnage on the roads.
Coupled with the significant decline in volunteers, fire districts now face a new threat; hostile boards populated by incompetent petty bureaucrats whose pernicious thirst for blood letting is second only to their wanton lust for increasing taxes and levies to build their empire. As seen in our district, this places all community members at significant risk from the decline in volunteering: one that has accelerated as a result of reckless board actions. Of concern now is the domino-effect these kinds of things tend to have on other districts…just as we’re now seeing.
It's worth noting here that one of the unspoken facets of the overall brotherhood of firefighters is the frequent going-out-of-the way to help out, helping across districts and even states on the other side of the country. When our now ex-fire chief lost his first wife nearly 20 years ago, multiple districts came to our aid. Fire trucks and crews were parked at our stations, manned by men and women whose silent acts of sacrifice and support have echoed warmly over the decades. Tellingly, none of those offers and sacrifices have come in for the district now after the board’s actions. Nobody anywhere near here wants to be seen as helping or supporting our reckless and irresponsible board.
The overall silent sentiment is, ‘let them fail.’
And fail is the operative word.
Their breathless disregard for public safety notwithstanding, in several later ‘emergency’ meetings, they boldly claimed to have “plenty” of applications for what was offered as a paid, part-time, $50/hr. 8-16 hours per week interim chief position. We suspect that in reality, the single and only application was from a chief who remains suspended in another department about 35 miles away, which would explain why the board so swiftly offered the position to him without performing any background checks. And if they did perform the necessary background checks and still hired him, it’s perhaps the most colossal bungling of a board hire that I’ve ever seen. He remains under suspension and is under an active investigation, but he’s now the interim chief here. (He’s also close friends with the Fog district chief – a district that has made several moves and that has designs to take over this district.)
Imagine that.
What’s next? If they manage to survive the coming recall, or don’t get sued into oblivion over response times or catastrophic incidents in the meantime, they will have no other choice but to quadruple and then some, the tax levy on the small community to pay for a full time chief. A chief that won’t find many willing to volunteer under the direction of the current board.
Please pray for miracles.
Who are these freaks, where do they come from, and how do we send them back seem to be questions small towns around the country need answers to quickly.