Hey, Chief! Have you been to a national fire conference lately? Have you been on the floor talking to the vendors? If you have, you probably were overwhelmed with things to read or pass on to others in your organization. If you haven't, you may not be as up-to-date as you like to think you are. In fact, if you haven't been in a well-attended exhibit hall in the last two or three years, your ability to be an intelligent consumer of fire protection services and technology may be deteriorating.

Or not. You see, it depends on how you see yourself in the overall scheme of things. If you're the chief of department, then you're responsible for the bottom line with respect to expenditures.

Because most of you are chiefs, I expect that you have a lot of responsibility for the financial aspects of your fire agencies. Leaving aside staffing, a fire chief has to perform four different tasks under the banner of fiscal and budget management:

1. Prepare justifications for acquisition,
2. Develop specifications for those items,
3. Recommend use of capital outlays in the budget and
4. Complete purchases after approval.

You may be wondering how these responsibilities relate to what's happening on the exhibit floors of conferences and meetings. More and more I see exhibit halls filled with department officers, firefighters and their families on one-day passes, but how qualified are they when it comes to budget expenditures? This question came up in a conversation with a vendor, after which I soon spotted several fire chiefs whom I knew well. Each of them was surrounded by a gaggle that consisted of both their own staff members and salespeople from the exhibitor's booth.

When I had a chance to talk to those chiefs alone, I posed the question asked earlier by my friend the vendor. One of the answers I received may represent an interesting transition in how chiefs and their staffs interact with the private vendors who help solve fire service problems. The chief, who is considered by many to be a real technical guy, told me that he was bringing his people in to help him write specifications and develop proposals because he was concerned that the changing technology would be harder and harder for him to follow. But he did have one thing to add: “I don't ever let them forget that while anyone can propose, it's up to me to approve.”

This topic was again brought to my attention by another observer, who said that many vendors now believe chiefs aren't even interested in the technical aspects of fire protection equipment, claiming that the chief has delegated that responsibility lower and lower in the organization. Hence, vendors shouldn't have to worry about what the fire chief thinks.

Well, vendors, if you're reading this column, take note. I'm not sure that this is a valid observation. At the risk of offending some of my vendor friends on the exhibit floor, I would like to provide some additional thoughts on this perception. Think about those four budget tasks: justification, specification, usage and acquisition. If you're selling something to the fire service, which one of these steps is the most important? Are there any steps you can just throw away and forget? I submit that they're equally significant and that a purchase can be derailed at any one of them. The modern fire chief plays a role in each step, but it may not by played in the same way it was in the past.

For example, I still can recall the day when a chief wrote a set of engine company specifications in his office, went to bid and took delivery of an apparatus — the fire department never knew what was coming until the day it showed up. While that may still happen in some places, enlightened chief officers have distributed the tasks and roles for major purchases throughout the organization. Even so, the acquisition of a piece of large equipment today is a major capital investment, and I don't know of one chief who has given up the overall responsibility for confirming the decision to purchase.

Over the last 10 or 15 years, contemporary fire departments and progressively thinking chiefs have begun to develop apparatus, tool and equipment committees to provide for the specifications that meet the rapidly changing and increasingly complex response profiles of their agencies. But allowing this form of participation in the design process doesn't mean that the chief has relinquished any decision-making responsibility. The bottom line is that the chief is the one who has to approve the outcome. That hasn't changed from the past at all.

Before any committee can convene to talk about any piece of equipment, there are fiscal components of tremendous importance that committee members can only witness. These include, but are not limited to, establishing apparatus amortization accounts and getting that vehicle in the budget and keeping it there. Once a purchase is justified in a budget, the committee can begin its work.

There are purchases that require specifications before budgeting, but that creates a chicken-and-egg situation. In the end, it doesn't make any difference what comes first if you never underestimate the role that chiefs play in paying the bills. It's their responsibility to be fiscally accountable.

At yet another fire service conference where I was contemplating the perception that the chief is out of the purchasing loop, I started keeping track of the chiefs I saw in the exhibit area. The ratio was about one chief to every 20 department members. This shouldn't surprise anyone, for the ratio of fire chief to firefighter is almost always one to some other number in the department. In my career it has varied from 1 to 50 to 1 to 250, and in metropolitan departments the ratio is one to thousands.

There are only so many chiefs, so when vendors evaluate the number of face-to-face contacts at many events, the ratio of chiefs to not-chiefs is almost always going to be skewed. One shouldn't confuse face-to-face contacts with qualified buyers. This is the other side of this issue: Ten qualified buyers are worth hundreds of lookie-loos. That doesn't mean that the people looking aren't important, because they have a role to play, too. Their job is to help the qualified buyer make a good decision.

A significant number of people in the exhibit hall are on a mission to learn and share that new knowledge once they return home. How do you tell the difference between them and the lookie-loos? Well, you might want to start off with the first few questions they ask. If the conversation starts with, “What are you giving away today,” you should know where they stand. If they ask to look at the specification sheet or the test results for your product, that's a different ballgame.

Now, no one person can remain an expert on everything that a contemporary fire department has to deal with, including the chief. I started off with a simple example, specifying a fire truck. Let's ratchet this up to include EMS and hazmat equipment, radios, computers, CAD, and more. I could add several hundred items to the inventory that weren't on display at any fire conference a decade ago. Some of those people moving down the aisles and asking questions were sent by their chiefs to become more enlightened consumers. Those chiefs might as well be looking over their shoulders. The people who chair PPE committees and the like are not free agents. They're empowered, but they're not autonomous.

The rate of technological change in the fire service is increasing at about the same rate as in society, with the only difference being that the fire service tends to be about five to 10 years behind the state of the art. Any fire chief who expects to keep up with that rate of change in all areas is delusional. Any vendors who expect the person standing in front of them asking very technical questions to be the fire chief are disconnected from how complex the system has become.

Now that we have explored the perception that chiefs are absent from the exhibit floor, I would like to ask those chiefs to think about this perception in relationship to their own experiences regarding the behaviors they must use to complete the four stages of fiscal control discussed earlier.

This is where the job gets complicated. Chiefs need to use their power of persuasion, possess technical writing skills, complete cost-benefit analyses and be accountable for outcomes. These skills and abilities, or lack thereof, are the paths to success or failure in seeking and acquiring the equipment that's out there in vendor booths or catalogs. Anyone can propose, but it's the chief's job to dispose

1. Power of persuasion is not an idle consideration. Vendors, if you can't convince those people who stroll through your booth to go back to argue for your product or service, all of the sales literature you can produce isn't going to make a difference. Chiefs, no matter what information or specification you collect or have others collect at conferences, unless you can obtain permission to buy what needs to be purchased, it won't happen. Power of persuasion is a combination of information and delivery. Chiefs put their credibility on the line when they advocate a solution, especially a costly one.

2. Technical writing skills are not something every chief needs to possess, but they certainly need to have access to them. A lack of technical writing skills may be why we need to delegate the task of developing specifications to others, but a chief still possesses the oversight to ensure that the credibility achieved through his or her power of persuasion isn't compromised by poor staff work. As for the vendors, salesmanship is also education. Not all education is marketing, and a great deal of marketing is not education.

3. Cost-benefit analyses are more and more a requirement when high-cost decisions must be made. It behooves the chief to have all of the facts about an acquisition, such as on-going maintenance costs and personnel impacts. Buying a major product or service is no longer the singular event of issuing a purchase order. It's an investment decision, and the chief is the one who has to be the expert on the return from that investment.

4. Accountability is shared up and down the chain of command, but it ultimately rests on the chief's shoulders. This behavior is aimed at ensuring that whatever is purchased at the taxpayers' expense is used judiciously and appropriately.

There really is a bottom line in the fire service, and it's found at the lower portion of most budget documents like purchase orders, contracts for service and long-term lease agreements. Moreover, it's reflected in a department's ability to complete the fiscal year on time, on target and on the money. The person most likely to be held responsible for placing a signature on that line is the person who will be held accountable if the department's purchases don't meet expectations. It's in the chief's best interest to be a well-informed, qualified buyer rather than a rubber stamp. It's in the vendor's best interest to have a knowledgeable customer, and that includes both the chief and the end user.

The next time you're on a conference exhibit floor, take a look around and ask yourself these questions: How many people are here to look, and how many people are here to learn?

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A 40-year veteran of the fire service, Ronny J. Coleman has served as fire chief in Fullerton and San Clemente, Calif., and was the fire marshal of the State of California from 1992 to 1999. He is a certified fire chief and a master instructor in the California Fire Service Training and Education System. A Fellow of the Institution of Fire Engineers, he has an associate's degree in fire science, a bachelor's degree in political science and a master's degree in vocational education.