Romeo and Juliet were deeply in love. The Hatfields and McCoys were bitter enemies. In the fire service, it is important for chiefs to understand the relationship between their department and nearby departments. It also is important to understand what those relationships may look like in the future.
One of the biggest topics of discussion these days has to do with consolidations, mergers and, yes, even hostile takeovers. Some fire departments are struggling to remain in existence, while others are engaging in a variety of behaviors to become part of a larger entity or to do the opposite. Some survive very well on their own. Some go into stressful times. For those that do look for a partner, how the two departments have seen each other from the beginning is one of the most essential elements of the future of the relationship. You don't marry someone you can't stand.
Although Romeo and Juliet had a tragic outcome, they did have one thing going for them. Apparently they thought very highly of each other. Their feelings were so strong, in fact, that they were willing to relinquish their lives because they thought it might have something to do with saving the other. Despite their 1880s tit-for-tat hostilities, the Hatfields and McCoys buried the hatchet generations ago.
No two organizations that do not want to be consolidated should ever be forced into a shotgun wedding. And no two organizations that have a strong desire to merge and become stronger as a result of that merger should ever be stopped from doing it. Consolidation will work when you want it to and it won't work when you don't want it to.
But is it in the fire service's best interest to engage in strategic alliances of this nature? There are factors at play that are pretty difficult to refute. One of the first contentions to evaluate is that any strategic alliance will make the two organizations stronger and minimize their weaknesses. While that may seem like a very straightforward statement, it is sometimes very difficult to evaluate adequately.
The rising cost of providing fire protection is the driving force behind a lot of this type of organizational behavior, and it is going to continue to become more complicated over the foreseeable decades. Public fire protection in most communities is not a matter of convenience. It is a level of service provided to a community that has a price tag. And as that price tag gets more and more burdensome, the community begins to question if this is an appropriate investment.
The single-station fire department with one truck, one chief and one crew is an endangered species. I am not urging the demise of these departments. But unless they have an adequate capacity to reinforce their single fire station through agreements with neighboring communities (through automatic aid and other written agreements), they probably will get hammered.
The term “hammered” is probably not found in too many management manuals, but it has a simple explanation. Imagine a fire department as a nail. Imagine someone with a hammer is about to drive the nail into a board one blow at a time. For fire departments, those blows are budget arguments, legal issues, more mandates from the state and federal government, a firefighter injury on the job, or worse yet, a line-of-duty death. That is what being “hammered” really means.
If a single-station fire department is vulnerable, there are many fire departments that border on being vulnerable because they are not large enough. In other words, the risks are there but policy makers simply will not make the financial commitment to mitigate them. Many chiefs have fire problems within their jurisdictions that they know they cannot handle. They may have tried to sell that argument to the boss, the city council or county board of supervisors. Some chiefs are in denial and hope that fire problem doesn't become reality on their watch.
When contemplating aligning departments, at some point it becomes crystal clear, that if you don't want to do it, you can find all sorts of reasons why you shouldn't. And if you really want to do it, you can find all sorts of justification to do so. The facts can be absolutely the same but the acceptance of the rationale can be either positive or negative.
Organizations interested in long-term survival have a pretty good understanding of their strengths and weaknesses. Those leaders who have a really good assessment of their organizations' capacity to perform when the resources are limited can size up these factors fairly quickly and determine if some level of cooperative effort is going to result in a positive outcome.
So what is it going to be, chief? Is it going to be a shotgun wedding, a marriage made in heaven, or the bachelor's life? Departments that want to remain entirely on their own and sustain their own operations should be allowed to do so up to the point when they fail. When they do fail, somebody had better be ready to step in because the public is the loser. Those departments that see the reasoning behind more collaborative behavior should not be interfered with by outside meddlers trying to make up irrelevant issues. Adequate service requires analysis, and the formula may work out totally different in fire departments all across this nation.
One of my early mentors was Keith Klinger. Klinger left the fire service in the early 1960s, about the time when a lot of fire departments were just barely getting off the ground. One lesson I learned from overhearing conversations between Klinger and my former boss was that you can learn a lot by keeping your mouth shut and listening. Few people in the fire service recall that Klinger was instrumental in getting the 1973 report on the state of fire safety “America Burning” off the ground. He was a wise and benevolent individual who helped create a fire agency that today could be pulled up as a role model on how to serve multiple communities with one method of operation.
Shakespeare's suicidal lovers or Appalachia's revenge-killing families may seem extreme analogies for fire departments. Yet, knowing the nature of the relationship between departments is an important matter. Start figuring out right now what your attitude is toward agency cooperation and be prepared to be an active participant if and when your agency raises this for consideration.
With more than 40 years in 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.
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