For over 35 years Glenn Whitaker as a member of the Kyle Fire Department has been answering calls for help from members of the Kyle community. These calls come in for house fires, business fires, cars stuck in flood waters and traffic accidents. Sometimes these calls came in the middle of the night when most of us would not want to get up out of bed, get dressed and head straight into a stressful situation. For most of those years after Chief Whitaker helped the Kyle community late at night as a fire fighter he had to go to work at a different job the next day without much sleep. This demonstrates Chief Whitaker’s dedication to the citizens of Kyle. The number of calls Mr Whitaker responded to averaged 233 calls a year while Mr Todd responded to only 29 calls a year. That is a substantial difference.
Every large organization that is expanding has procedures and policies that they can improve on. The Kyle Fire Department is not an organization that is broken and in need of a major overhaul. It is an organization that does a lot more right than it does wrong. Firing the Chief that has guided the Kyle Fire Department through years of growth seems reckless and unwise. A better course of action for both the Kyle Fire Department and the citizens of Kyle is to keep Chief Whitaker and help him enhance his department.
Alan Duerr
Kyle
