How many of you can recall the combination to your high school locker? Mine was 11 to the right, 18 to the left and 32 to the right. I have absolutely no idea where that old combination lock is today, but that number is stored in my mind just as surely as my own name is. As you would expect, the combination worked on my lock but not on others.

In life, any combination that moves you in the right direction and helps you accomplish an objective is a good one. In high school, your objective was to get into your locker, which had a simple combination. In the fire service, one of our more difficult combinations is the concept of mixing full-time forces with part-timers.

This discussion is very appropriate today. In NFPA 1710, Organization and Deployment of Fire Suppression, Emergency Medical Operations, and Special Operations to the Public by Career Fire Departments, there are statements that prompted many people to ask what the right combination would be. Although we know that 1710 refers to mostly paid fire departments and nfpa 1720 talks about mostly volunteer fire departments, what does “mostly” mean?

I thought it would be interesting to look at the combination fire department concept as there are so many of them in existence, because almost any fire department that has some personnel who aren't paid is by definition a combination department. Nobody has any difficulty describing a totally volunteer or career departments. The criterion for each is simple.

But between those black-and-white definitions is a whole range of gray. Unfortunately, the fire service hasn't provided a very clear-cut definition of those distinctions, which is somewhat surprising when you consider the fact that almost all fire departments started off as volunteers. The reason that they go into full-time career status ranges all the way from economics to politics. So why hasn't anybody really looked at what happens in between?

This is a transitional issue. I would guess that a large number of people reading this column are in fire departments that have various configurations of full-time and part-time personnel. If I were to ask you if your department has the right combination, I would get a variety of answers from you and the members of your organization.

If you're the chief, you most likely believe that your department's combination is good because it gives you the ability to meet certain initial attack responsibilities while providing a reserve work force that can deal with large-scale emergencies. If you're a labor leader, you may look at this differently, to put it mildly. I find it interesting that many in the fire service who started off as volunteers gain a certain disrespect for volunteers as soon as they themselves become paid. Of course, this contrasts with the fact that many full-time paid firefighters also are volunteers in neighboring communities. What's going on here?

The answer is so simple that it defies simplification. A combination fire department is any combination of resources that meets the needs of the organization and allows the organization to function within its budgetary constraints. Maybe that's too general. A combination fire department is any fire department that uses both full-time and part-time people to meet commissions and goals of the organization. It really doesn't get much simpler than that.

So let's go back to our discussion of what's mostly volunteer or mostly paid. On the one hand, it would be simple if we could use a very straightforward number, such as 51%, as the cut-off point. But this logic falls apart if you have a fire department that consists of only two paid people and six volunteers, especially if the two paid people are expected to handle 90% of the workload and the volunteers are used only on a part-time basis.

Perhaps we should be looking at the differences between paid and volunteer departments in terms of the performance expectations of the department. For example, I believe that any time a fire department dispatches a fire truck to the scene of an emergency without recalling the volunteer force to reinforce them, they're trying to act as a career organization. In contrast, any fire department that activates and recalls their volunteer fire force to provide initial attack services is operating as a volunteer organization.

The distinction being drawn here is who goes out first and who tries to handle the incipient emergency. Sending a one-person fire truck to the scene of a structure fire without recalling additional personnel on initial dispatch is like sending a kamikaze pilot out to sink an aircraft carrier. With that analogy in mind, I propose that we not look at fire departments in terms of staff numbers but rather in terms of the critical tasks of the first-due engine.

Critical tasking is a concept that has been defined and expanded by the Commission on Fire Accreditation International. It's a definition of jobs to be performed in relationship to resources available to complete them. It's important to realize that a department is essentially fully paid when it expects all the critical tasks to be performed by the people on the fire companies who are dispatched at the alarm. A department is a volunteer department if it must recall any part of the effective response force to complete all of the critical tasks.

The test is relatively straightforward. If you have 100 volunteer firefighters on the force and six two-person engine companies, and the department sends all 12 of those engine company members to the scene of a fire before recalling a single volunteer, then the department's acting as a fully paid force.

A fire department moving from a volunteer to a paid force has been experienced in thousands of communities across this country, and I've been involved in at least two of these transitions personally. The International City/County Management Association recently published a report, “Managing Conflict in Combination Fire Departments,” available through the ICMA bookstore. Conflicts! Where does it say in the nfpa's standards of response coverage that we're supposed to have conflict?

The reality is that there has never been a single fire department that has gone from the totally volunteer stage to another stage without experiencing some kind of conflict. In some cases, it has been handled very professionally with a high degree of mutual respect. Or it's been a dogfight.

I believe that any combination will work if you have a plan, and if you don't have a plan no combination will work. The emphasis here is on developing a plan so that everyone knows what's expected of the various parties as the organization undergoes the transition from one staffing configuration to another.

Departments anticipating a combination operation shouldn't just cobble things together from the pieces left over from the way things used to be and plug in things that people would like to see in the future. An appropriately designed combination fire department can be extremely effective, but this effectiveness isn't built overnight. There are issues associated with running a good combination department that can't be overlooked, such as training and education of all personnel, communications, deployment and incident command criteria, compensation, career development and human relations.

If we look at that military's concept of reserve forces, you'll notice that there are no double standards. If you're an officer in the reserves, you're still an officer. If you're trained in a technical specification in the reserves, you're still expected to perform that when you go on active duty. Law enforcement has done this much better than the fire service. As a matter of fact, the law enforcement community recognized a long time ago that building a strong reserve force builds a political power base in the community.

As for the department itself, why must the transition occur? If you take a look at most fire agencies, the makeup of the original volunteers represented the social fabric of most communities. I have been in thousands of volunteer fire stations, and it's easy to see that the people who started many of these fire agencies were highly dedicated and committed to community.

Community is the key word. When the community itself changes, it increases the demands upon the volunteer services of those same dedicated individuals. Eventually, something has to give, at which point the very same people who benefited from a volunteer fire service become the first to criticize it for not being able to meet these new demands.

It's my observation that there are very few communities of more than 25,000 that have full-time volunteer fire forces. There are some, but they tend to be those communities that are isolated from others. In contemporary society, when we reach about 25,000 people, especially if they're commuters, it's harder to sustain a volunteer fire force.

This is when departments start adding their first complement of full-time personnel. Sometimes a paid chief replaces the volunteer fire chief. Sometimes the drivers are paid initially so that someone will take care of the fire apparatus. It also isn't uncommon for the fire marshal to become one of the first paid positions during transition.

From populations of 25,000 on up to another as yet undetermined figure, combination departments abound. I've seen combination departments that protect very complex communities, but what I find interesting about this phenomenon is that many times when a fire department has been set up as a combination organization, the public believes that it has a full-time fire department. Then of course there are departments that simply don't have any volunteers and never will. It's not that volunteers wouldn't be useful; it's the fact that the demands are so intense that very few who work for a living can even begin to participate in the process.

So there we have it. A combination fire department. There are some outstanding ones. There are some that are getting incrementally better every day, and there are others that are getting incrementally worse day by day. The ones that are succeeding have something in common, beyond having a plan. There's a certain professional respect between the two types of staffing configuration so that conflict is minimized when responding to alarms, taking care of fire stations and otherwise conducting business in the department.

Who knows what the right combination is? Just like spinning the dial on my old combination lock, if I hit the right numbers and moved in the right direction, the lock opens. If I overshot the mark or went in the wrong direction, I wasn't paying attention to the details. I could sit there and jerk on that lock all day long and it would never open. Same with a combination fire department. It takes detail and direction, and when it works, you know it works.

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Ronny J. Coleman is the president of the Fire & Emergency Television Network and a 40-year veteran of the fire service. He 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.