By KIM HILSENBECK
The Kyle Fire Department Board of Directors came close to firing Chief Glenn Whitaker during a vote last week.
Three board members voted in favor of the chief’s termination, three were against, and one member abstained.
Fire Board President Josh Todd said the move was not about Whitaker personally.
“He’s a stand-up guy and a good firefighter,” said Todd, who voted for the termination.
Why would the fire board take such a vote in the first place?
The real issue appears to be a movement among the firefighters, volunteers and other employees in the 82-person organization to change the direction of the department as it transitions from an all-volunteer to part-paid staff. Todd claims that recent turnovers in the organization stemmed from firefighters being unhappy with how things were run and wanting the organization to modernize.
“We need to become a more sophisticated fire department,” Todd said.
Deputy Chief Rick Beaman said it’s not unusual to cause a few ripples during a transition to a paid staff with volunteers.
“We want more firefighters, same as the board,” Beaman said. “But we are doing the best we can with the money we have.”
Todd was one of three newly elected board members that started their two-year terms in February. He said the members elected new leadership to help the department become more professional, citing a lack of accountability within the current organization structure.
He also cited concerns over the number of firefighters that go on calls. With five full-time paid firefighters per shift, Todd believes the department needs more paid staff. He says it’s getting harder to rely on non-paid firefighters since the organization transitioned from all volunteer to part-paid, part-volunteer.
“We respect our volunteer staff,” Todd said, “but the board believes we must do whatever we can to get more paid staff and continue to work toward being a professional department.”
Todd said the Buda Fire Department is a good model of how to operate. He said Buda has more than twice as many paid firefighters as Kyle and only two chiefs. Kyle has four paid chiefs and one volunteer chief.
Todd and other members of the fire board say they advocated for some of the current assistant and division chiefs to be reassigned and reclassified as captains and therefore act as firefighters. He said this would help alleviate member concerns.
Beaman provided data showing that of the four paid chiefs within the organization, each has continued to go on calls and perform the duties of a firefighter when needed.
Whitaker has been on 1,164 calls in the past five years. Beaman has gone on 1,417. Data shows that Todd, a volunteer firefighter for the past two years, has gone on 58 calls.
According to Beaman, the fire board does not take into account the volunteer staff and its contributions when it cites concerns about staffing.
“These folks are required to give at least 12 hours a month, and we have almost 30 volunteers in our department,” he said.
The Kyle Fire Department was an all-volunteer organization until about eight years ago when the first paid staff came on board. Whitaker, who served as a volunteer firefighter from 1973 until 2009, took the reins as the first paid fire chief in the department’s history.
Both factions within the fire department and the governing board agree the organization is struggling with some growing pains. Buda Fire Department Chief Clay Huckaby said this all sounds familiar.
“We went through this same thing that Kyle is going through now,” Huckaby said.
Buda now has about 32 full-time paid firefighters, compared to Kyle’s 15. An additional four paid personnel are on the administrative side of the business.
Both departments still rely on volunteers; Kyle more so since it has about half the number of paid staff in fire operations as Buda.
Todd said the Kyle fire board wants to see more paid firefighters on staff, revised employee policies, guidelines for response times, and other standards that have not been in place in the past.
Do these issues present any danger to the tax-paying public?
“I truly don’t think the public is in danger,” Todd said. “But as we become more complex, we have a duty to improve service and we need to do it right.”
Some say the fire board is not the appropriate authority to lead the department in the future.
There is a movement under way to transfer oversight of the fire department’s operations from the fire board to the five-member board of the Hays County Emergency Services District No. 5, which collects taxes to fund the department and approves its budget. The fire board recently rejected a new contract from the ESD that would have taken away its authority to hire and fire the chief.
For his part, Whitaker said he understands the fire board’s concerns and echoed Beaman’s desire to hire more staff. But without additional tax revenue for the ESD, Whitaker said they have to do what they can with what they have.
Whitaker and Beaman said they do not believe service has been diminished or safety compromised as a result of staffing levels.
As far as being almost voted out of a job by a group of relatively young fire board members, he said perhaps there is a new-school, old-school issue in terms of adapting to change and moving forward.
“But I care about this community, and I take these issues seriously,” Whitaker said. “And I don’t care what anyone says – I do care about this department.”
