In August 2006, Bob Khan became chief of the Phoenix Fire Department, stepping up after longtime Chief Alan Brunacini retired. He now oversees the department's 2,000 members, 54 fire stations and $220 million budget.

Khan joined the department as a firefighter in 1982. Khan also was long-recognized as the fire department's spokesperson, appearing on radio and a monthly TV program and as columnist for the Arizona Republic.

Khan is a graduate of Arizona State University's Fire Science Institute, the John F. Kennedy School of Government's Crisis Management program, and MIT's Negotiating Labor Agreements program.

The soft-spoken chief shared his thoughts about his transition to department head.

Many people in the fire and emergency services have asked how does a new fire chief follow a fire service icon like Alan Brunacini?

Chief Brunacini was obviously a mentor to me for the last 12 years, particularly when I started doing staff and public-information work. I gravitated toward community issues, as well as political and labor issues, ending up as the human resource officer. I got to spend a lot of time working with him and looking at a lot of the different challenges that a large fire department would have.

Following somebody like Alan Brunacini is a little like following Vince Lombardi. He really put the Phoenix Fire Department on the map and did so much for the fire service. I had to look at some of the critical issues that I thought we needed to put back into the system and address some of the challenges that I saw with the Phoenix Fire Department. I looked at it with a new set of eyes and asked some challenging questions. If you want to make improvements, you have to challenge what you're doing and get feedback and act on that feedback.

Since you knew the chief was retiring, did you talk to him about the transition?

Not specifically. Our relationship was so strong, and we were so close, it was a very difficult time for both of us. To be blunt, Chief Brunacini was really struggling with what he was going to do after retirement or exactly what his role would be in the fire service. I think he had a sense of what he wanted to do, but I'm not sure that the system was lining up with it. When I say system, the elected officials and city manager were looking for some sort of new administration. I don't think that those two entities were lining up, and I was somewhere in the middle and, at the very least, that's a very difficult position to be in.

Was Brunacini restricted from visiting stations or the headquarters?

No, not at all. Did you really hear that? No. I think he's met with my firefighters and engaged in discussions with them.…

It had to have been a challenge to take over a highly visible department like Phoenix from a fire chief who was your mentor.

I went into this position with my eyes wide open. I didn't recognize the challenges I would have with being in that role, being so close to Chief Brunacini, knowing that he was at a different place than they were and not knowing how you could really bridge that transition. Basically, I had to step into that role and make decisions on my own and do the best I could for the department. That was a very difficult place to be in as a new chief with somebody I have so much respect for. But at the same time, there were certain expectations on me as a new CEO for the fire department. A lot of what [Brunacini] did, we knew about and developed together, but as far as his role after his retirement from the fire department, there wasn't a great deal of input or influence I could have on the system; it was just pretty much mandated.

How did you start the transition to fire chief?

My goal was to develop a strategic plan — talk to the command officers, the company officers and find out what the balance would be in managing a department as a new fire chief, yet not be disruptive to the culture we established here, the progressiveness or the sense of empowerment that our members have. A lot of those things are critical to the department.

I tend to do things through consensus and like to do team-building. It was enormously important to me to stay connected with the Valley [of the Sun] fire departments. To do all that in 12 months was a challenge. People don't know where you're coming from, and any change you make ripples out, and there's a sense of uncertainty. If you look at a lot of administrations, they get about 90 days to establish what their administration is going to be like and to make changes. People will start making assessments on how that administration is going to evolve and develop, not necessarily what the end game is going to be, but how much development and progress they will have and that's monitored in the first 90 days.

Did already being part of the department make it easier?

If you look at the role of a new fire chief, it's really the incumbent administration that's going to help with that transition. Very seldom will the new person be able to influence that. While they are put into a role typically by a process, that process, no matter how you slice it up, is going to be influenced by city officials and city managers. I don't know how it is on the East Coast, but that's how it is in the West.

We have a strong form of city-manager government and also a very strong mayor in this city. They are pretty much going to set up a process to pick the person and what that person is going to do. If you're looking at the change they would like to see, then they are going to dictate that. The new person is going to have to fall into that role and meet their expectations and at the same time provide the best service they can for that fire department.

Phoenix Fire Department has a new mission statement, and you developed a new three-year strategic plan. What was your goal?

When I got this position, one of the documents I presented was a sort of “challenges of the department” that stated what we needed to address. It eventually became a citywide review of other city departments, from city law to streets and public works. In the middle of this, we expanded it into a three-year strategic plan, but ours is a living plan that will continue.

How did you select the people to participate in the strategic plan?

It was an open venue. We said we were going to develop a strategic plan and we're only as good as the weakest part of this process, which is getting people there and participating. Having faith that we wanted to initiate change, they showed up in droves and were very passionate about it. We had participation from the union president right down to the line personnel.

Basically, our strategic plan is a footprint that had a lot of input from our department. I may have kicked the ball down the hill and got it rolling, but there was a lot of feedback and input from the different initiative meetings that we had. I'm actually waiting to see if we're going to have a funding source and how we manage this plan. Some are attainable goals — a social worker in the alarm room — regardless of the funding source. If you have an extra $14 million you can be pretty courageous; if you don't, you have to be pretty innovative. We need to wait until Sept. 12 [elections] to see how aggressive we can be with this plan.

What advice would you offer a new fire chief going into a similar situation?

You need to understand what's expected of the fire department, what the community's expectations are. What are the opportunities and challenges of the department? How is it viewed from other city departments, the city managers and elected officials? You have to understand where labor is and what their expectations are.

It's sort of the Rolling Stones song [“You Can't Always Get What You Want”]; there are wants and there are needs. If you're the fire chief, you have to look beyond just the wants — people want to lower the response times or personal agendas of wants. There are going to be organizational needs; training or equipment, staffing issues, communications issues.

What you have to do when you're at that tipping point is [determining] what's the difference between what the real needs are and what the wants are. Sit down and meet with elected officials, city heads and labor leaders and then get out and sit down with the troops about what's going on and what's their expectations of a new leadership. Then you balance it.

You may not always line up with the city manager, the city officials or labor on certain issues, or even [with] your own chief officers. You have to respect what your chief officers are doing out there and support them. As you try to find the balance, you need to find the critical needs and those will be consistent for the fire service: training, firefighter safety, customer service and now EMS is huge for us. Diversity — not only inside the department, but the kind of delivery that you provide from pediatrics to geriatrics — you have to take it all in, process it and what changes you can make.

What were some of the other changes implemented your first 90 days?

My assessment was to balance the department with administration and operational needs. I would describe it that “all tides rise ships to the same level.” [We] were just a little out of balance and I added a matrix to reflect that and make sure our span of control was appropriate for section heads, assistant chiefs and division heads and then to line up the sections with the appropriate division.

We didn't have an EMS division and EMS is 90% of what we do. It was a section under operations. Anything that is 90% of what you do, you need to devote more time to it. Fire prevention was a huge bundle of operations, urban search and rescue, code enforcement, hazardous materials inspections, fire investigations, education and community involvement; it really needed two division heads to manage it from an operations side and code enforcement.

My goal was to create two executive assistants, administrative and operations, and to … line up the functions with the division heads. Emergency service is what we do on the street — shift commanders, fire stations trucks, calls, dispatch — it's everything we do, but EMS is really the heart of what we do now. Fire-based EMS is our greatest challenge over the next 15 or 20 years. It's really our bread and butter. It seemed reasonable to add a division for that function.

Over the last five to 10 years, urban services have evolved, dealing with the airports, investigations, homeland security and police, public affairs, education, special operations, hazmat teams and working with other city departments like water services. In fact, we've been trying to work within the city departments and understanding what our role is as a “sister” department to public works and transportation or the police and even personnel, trying to understand what are their expectations of the fire service.

I was surprised to hear at the Arizona Fire Chiefs conference how actively involved local governments are with local fire departments.

There is a very strong connection with the fire service and a lot of that is also from the Professional Firefighters of Arizona, the United Phoenix Firefighters and a lot of political influence from the unions…. We've got to be one of the few cities in America where the mayor is sponsoring a sales tax increase to provide considerable funding for both police and fire departments and this is on the heels of a franchise assessment that provided us with the heavy rescue. Our mayor's son is a police officer and he's been very committed to public safety and has a great deal of influence on the city manager.

If you look at police and fire across the valley, the whole automatic aid system — Goodyear, Avondale and all the way to Mesa — there is a great deal of oversight and connectivity to the fire service. They are very familiar with response times and the automatic aid system. The fire service is definitely on the screen of all city or town managers and elected officials in the valley.

What are you most proud of in your first year?

The organizational support I've had and the way this department has rallied around me. For being such a public person, I'm not really comfortable in a public venue. I'd rather be a student than a teacher. I did the state-of-the-department addresses and captains' meetings, that's not probably my strong suit. I'd rather learn and share information. [I was proud] to see people rally around concepts and that people aren't afraid to give me honest answers. To hear they are happy with the way things are going, from the troops to the executive teams has been very rewarding.

Honestly, when you're following somebody like Chief Brunacini, you wonder what that response will be, how will they receive you or embrace what you're doing. To see the work they are doing and their commitment to the organization has been enormously rewarding. The first 90 days were some difficult times, and you wonder. But a year down the road, you have all of these people coming together to put together a strategic plan, not only just saying it but going to meetings and participating, is extremely rewarding for me.

I'm a different kind of chief officer. I evolved 14 years on a fire company as a captain and I worked on paramedic engine companies in south and south central Phoenix my whole career and then got in community work and public information. So my strength isn't necessarily operations as much as administration. I was on a fire truck and delivering ALS service, so I felt very connected to a lot of people who came to the meetings and said, “these are the calls we're responding on and we're probably doing EMS/fire department; how are you going to help us, chief?” I let them put it out there.

I know what I liked as a captain: two-person paramedic companies, four-person companies. I liked the uniformity of it. I think five-person ladder trucks are enormously helpful on the fireground.

What about the controversial National Incident Management System and Phoenix?

Some things you just inherit. For all the right reasons, you have to recognize NIMS and engage with it and make sure you are using a model that reflects the National Incident Management System. I'm very committed to it, and we're all going through NIMS classes. There's some balance in the way we manage our day-to-day activities with the model that we've used. Some of it is connected to semantics, but everybody in the fire service needs to understand NIMS and have a good working knowledge of it. You need to use some sort of a command structure on your day-to-day incidents that's effective.

Though they are different arenas, what we're doing now will become NIMS-compliant. The first leg is making sure all of our members are certified in NIMS and then there will be a better understanding of the system that we use now and how you marry the two. We need to understand what the challenges are, figure out what is expected. We're bringing in people from New York and other places to help us with this. We're using national fire service folks to better understand what we do everyday and we create a system that will reflect compliance to NIMS.

The growth in this part of Arizona is amazing.

By 2010 we'll probably have a $20 million training facility built on 60 acres. Glendale's facility is almost complete, and the east valley is doing the same thing. The challenge we face is are we doing the same thing the Mesa-Gilbert area and the Goodyear-Glendale area? That's the beauty of the regional training relationship, that we have and our regional dispatch system. All of those officers meet on a regular basis and share information, policies and deployment models, so we all speak the same language. That's the only way to keep up with that much growth. The regional system is at the center of the growth we are trying to manage right now.

How has the Phoenix Command Training Center changed?

Companies are stronger if they train together, if line firefighters knew what captains were thinking and captains knew what the battalion chiefs were thinking. Instead of just bringing chief officers or company officers down, I wanted to see entire companies do simulations together. The staff rallied and is now running entire companies through the command training center so firefighters can understand why it's so disruptive when they go wandering off and freelance and what concerns the captains will have.

If you look at a lot of decisions that are made, [they're] in the first five minutes of a fire, and firefighters aren't always making good decisions and may not understand the big picture. We did it for years with blackboards and cardboard boxes, where the younger firefighters could see what the older firefighters knew and just have a discussion about what the captains were doing and a good battalion chief could engage and explain what they are looking at. That's how we are using the command training center.

What would you like to share with our readers?

I'm not on a national level. I've really been a local yokel and I don't know a lot about other departments. I don't know what people are saying about Phoenix, but there are probably a lot of questions and a lot waiting to see what happens. We're going in a good direction. I hit the ground running and made some pretty dramatic changes.

We had a lot of retirements and we promoted a lot of officers and that was part of the transition to support the appropriate divisions. There was quite a bit of movement and the system has responded well to that. We're looking to the future. I'll probably be doing this for a while, I've got a 4- and a 6-year-old. I love the fire service and I enjoy Phoenix. I was born here and I don't anticipate moving anywhere else. I'm committed to the firefighters who work with me. I've grown up in this system. I don't know anything else.… For a while there I was wondering what the heck I did, but now I feel comfortable.

I have a lot of respect for what everybody did before me and what got us to this place. I can't even begin to describe the indebtedness that I have for those folks and what they did. I have an obligation to keep it going. The first six months were like jumping on the freeway with a skateboard, like whoa! But it's a learning curve — and I'm comfortable with it — and so is being a modern fire chief.