The Arizona Fire Chiefs Association members are meeting to address the recently announced closures and develop a transition plan for eliminated services, said its executive director Ron Dennis.

In early January, Arizona’s Office of State Fire Marshal released a memo based on Gov. Jan Brewer’s mandate that every city department cut 15% from its budget and eliminate programs not mandated by statue. Specifically, statewide certification programs have been eliminated, including Firefighter I and II certification and instructor and fire inspector training. Dennis said these programs were targeted because no state law exists that requires firefighters to be certified, even though most departments require it and the state fire marshal built a curriculum around such a need. 

“We’ve all participated in [training] even though the statute does not require it,” he said. “Well now, since the statute doesn’t require it the governor has eliminated it, and there’s no methodology to get a certification in the state of Arizona.”

Other cuts affected the management of statewide mutual-aid resources.  Dennis explained that the statewide mutual-aid program has a memorandum of understanding with the association. The office was to help support the equipment and personnel resources tracking and to staff the emergency operations center if there was a major emergency, both of which were run by a fire resource coordinator. That’s changed since the coordinator position was eliminated, and the office suspended its National Fire Incident Reporting System coordination. The responsibility now has shifted to local agencies and the state’s office of emergency management.

“Everything in writing right now with our mutual-aid program … we have to go back to the drawing board and determine how to make it work,” Dennis said.

AFCA members currently are working on ways to transfer training to an entity that would have the ability to absorb the responsibility for certification, records management and other duties, Dennis said. A mutual-aid task force will determine who gets called to man the state’s emergency operations center during statewide emergencies and determine how the resource database can be transferred to the division of emergency management. The task force also will determine who will be responsible for updating the database.

However, funding the transitional plans may be a problem.

“We have no access to funds and doubt the state would give us access to funds at this point,” Dennis said. “If an entity was supposed to take this on, what would be the cost and where would the money come from?”