Career Fire Chief of the Year Bill Peterson of Plano, Texas, has built an impressive array of accomplishments on the twin foundations of experience and education.

Growing up in Chicago's southern suburbs, Bill Peterson dreamed not of the blare of fire sirens, but of the roar of rockets and jet engines. The 1960s were the glory days of nasa's manned space-flight missions, after all, and Peterson wanted to be an aeronautical engineer.

That Peterson left his aerospace ambitions behind is perhaps less surprising than how much he wound up bringing along on his journey to becoming Fire Chief's 2000 Career Fire Chief of the Year. Spend a while talking with Peterson, who's been chief of the Plano (Texas) Fire Department for the past 18 years, and you realize this is a man who firmly believes that learning seldom goes to waste. Education and work have been woven together closely throughout his career.

"I was always interested in mechanical things," says Peterson, and after graduating from high school in Evergreen Park, Ill., in 1964, he began studying engineering science at Illinois Benedictine College. He "didn't adapt real well to the college environment," however, he recalls, because he found the courses too abstract.

He switched to Lewis University in Lockport, Ill., and to a program in aviation technology. After being certified as an airframe-and-powerplant mechanic, he started working for United Airlines at O'Hare International Airport, while also serving as a Naval Reserve ground crew member on an air transport squadron at Glenview (Ill.) Naval Air Station.

In the meantime, however, a huge change in Peterson's life was beginning to unfold. "A friend was on the fire department in Evergreen Park and dragged me along one night" in 1965, he recalls. "It kind of grew on me."

Did it ever. Peterson quit his United job in 1970 so he could get off the swing shift and start attending night school in fire science. His new day job was as a civil engineering technician with General Dynamics in Chicago.

Sped along by his previous college coursework, Peterson believes he was probably the first person in Illinois to receive an associate's degree in fire science, from Moraine Valley Community College in 1972. Starting the following year, and for the next 10 years, he also taught fire science there.

In 1974, General Dynamics began downsizing, so Peterson, by now a paid-on-call lieutenant and an instructor with the Evergreen Park Fire Department, applied for the fire marshal's job in Bolingbrook, Ill. The town was growing rapidly, and the fire chief there "felt my background was ideal," he says.

His rapid rise notwithstanding (he'd never been a full-time career firefighter), Peterson earned his bachelor's degree in fire protection administration from Lewis University while he was on the Bolingbrook Fire Department. He'd already set his sights on a five-bugle position someday, he explains, but felt "I didn't really have the skills to be a good and effective fire chief."

In 1980, a year after finishing his bachelor's degree, Peterson got that fifth bugle by becoming the fire chief in Waukegan, Ill., a large suburb on Chicago's North Shore. Once again, though, he was proactive about getting the knowledge he needed: He'd already begun a master's program in public administration and human relations.

The effects of education Based on his own experience as a fire officer, Peterson contends that liberal arts and management education is "most definitely" more important for fire chiefs than fire science is. "To some extent, it's made me a better chief," he says, "because it's given me the same background as city managers. It's given me a better big-picture sort of view.

"The job [of fire chief] is a whole lot different than what we perceive when we first set that goal," Peterson says. He describes his father visiting him occasionally when he was chief in Waukegan: "He'd come up and he'd expect me to go out on fire calls," when in fact Peterson would usually be stuck in his office working on budgetary matters or strategic planning.

As a fire chief, he says, "you're dealing with problems you never even imagined the fire chief had to deal with." Compounding this, Peterson adds, is the problem of inadequate preparation for the job: "We don't do a good job of preparing people to be fire chiefs."

In his master's degree work, Peterson found the human relations studies especially worthwhile: "You're not accomplishing anything if you're not getting buy-in and enthusiasm from the work force."

Another valuable slice of management education came on the job at General Dynamics, Peterson reports. His boss there was both in charge of a great deal of budgeting and working on his mba. Peterson assisted his boss with both work projects and school assignments, he says, and in the process, "I learned a lot of budgeting skills - and justification skills." One of the specific results, he says, is that he has carried a private sector-style attention to the organization's financial bottom line throughout his career.

If the management side of Peterson's background, and even the management side of the engineering portion, have been important to his effectiveness as a fire chief, that doesn't mean that the engineering knowledge itself fell by the wayside. For one thing, he has been a member of the Society of Fire Protection Engineers since 1977.

Peterson also says that his pre-engineering background, which would be much more typical of many European chief fire officers, has benefitted him in a broader way. "I tend to take a systems approach to fire protection," he says, "as opposed to `We need more fire trucks.'"

"The average fire department in this country just cannot handle a fire in a structure of more than 5,000 or 10,000 square feet," he points out, so it just makes sense for a fire department to emphasize fixed fire protection systems as part of its mission.

Another side of this systems mindset is Peterson's longtime advocacy for sprinkler systems.

A new home, on the range In 1982, with his master's degree freshly finished and greener pastures beckoning, Peterson traded the heat and humidity of Chicago-area summers for the heat and humidity of the Dallas-Fort Worth area, where he became the fire chief in Plano. Like Bolingbrook, Plano was entering a period of sustained, rapid growth. "The city was looking for someone with a big-picture, long-term point of view," he explains.

At that point in his life, Peterson had a new partner as well as a new job. He married his wife, Diane, a former Bolingbrook Fire Department dispatcher, shortly before moving to Texas.

Plano's large tax base (it has Texas' highest average per-capita income and is also home to J.C. Penney corporate headquarters) might suggest that Peterson can just sign on the dotted line for what his department needs. The truth is more complex.

Though his 300-person department does have an annual budget of about $23 million, Peterson reports that the city administration is very committed to keeping taxes down. For example, Plano has fewer firefighters per 1,000 population (between 1.05 and 1.1) than all but one other city in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, and the one that has even fewer firefighters per capita doesn't run ems, which Plano does.

"We've still managed, through the systems approach, to get an iso Class 1," Peterson points out.

The Plano Fire Department is tops in other ways, too. Because the City of Plano rates fire and ems as separate areas in its citywide customer-service survey, the fire department currently holds the top two spots on the survey.

Peterson expects such excellence of both himself and everyone on the department. "The fire chief's position today is not different from any other business in the city," he says, and that includes setting the tone for quality. The Plano Fire Department, already accredited by the Commission on Accreditation of Ambulance Services, is working toward peer review by the Commission on Fire Accreditation International.

After arriving at Plano, Peterson continued to pursue his own professional development, attending his third course at the National Fire Academy. Better yet, in 1985 he was chosen to attend the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University under the fema-sponsored Program for Senior Executives in State and Local Government.

Mostly because of the job's variety of duties, Peterson says he feels fortunate every day to be a fire chief. In the morning, for example, he might be working with developers and architects on a building project, then spend part of the afternoon handing out trophies for a local Fire Prevention Week poster contest. The next day he might give a presentation on the Incident Management System to managers at J.C. Penney headquarters.

It hasn't always been that way, though. In Waukegan, where Peterson reported to an elected mayor, he says, "Everything was politicized. I was probably pretty close to the point of wanting to be somewhere else, not in the fire service."

When there's that much conflict, he says, "Everybody loses. If management and labor can't work together, there's no future."

Think globally, act locally One of the hallmarks of Peterson's tenure in Plano has been a high level of civic involvement. He has served as an officer in the Kiwanis Club, the March of Dimes, Sister Cities International and the Plano Children's Medical Clinic. "The fire department has a vested interest in being involved" in community service organizations, he says, and besides, "I enjoy the proactive involvement in the community."

At the state level, Peterson has been active in the Texas Fire Chiefs Association, but it's at the national and international levels that his efforts have mostly been focused. He served for 10 years on an American Society for Testing and Materials task force on ems delivery and has done project, board and committee work for ichiefs, the nfpa and ifsta. In addition, he has written more than 20 articles for a wide variety of fire service publications. Most recently, Peterson served on the panel for the American Burning Recommissioned report.

One ongoing project that has taken up a lot of Peterson's time and energy for much of the past decade is the United Kingdom/United States Fire Service Symposium, whose annual meetings have been chronicled in Fire Chief since their inception.

The symposium originated in 1994 in a shuttle van in Hannover, Germany, where Peterson happened to be sitting next to Dennis Davis, who was then the chief fire officer of the Cheshire (U.K.) Fire Brigade. Both men had traveled to Hannover to attend Interschutz, the enormous German fire exhibition held only every six years.

Davis shared with Peterson his vision of a trans-Atlantic conference that would bring together American and British fire officers to discuss solutions to common problems. Peterson was immediately intrigued by the project, which needed a U.S. fire chief to anchor the American end of things. "I said, `I'd like to take that on,'" he recalls.

After two years of planning - mostly by phone, mail and fax, but with a face-to-face meeting between Davis and Peterson at a fire conference in Finland - the symposium debuted in Orlando in 1996. Peterson is characteristically modest about his role in assembling this ongoing conference. "Anybody could have done it," he says. "I was just in the right place at the right time."

Davis, however, is much more inclined to give Peterson credit for anchoring the U.S. side of this trans-Atlantic partnership. Peterson was "enthusiastic and energetic and prepared to do something," Davis says. "He did all the legwork. That's the top and bottom of it."

"International involvement is the future of the fire service," Peterson says. "The problems we're facing here in the United States are the exact same problems as in the U.K., in Nigeria, in India."

To bolster his point, he reaches for "The Death of Distance: How the Communications Revolution Will Change Our Lives," by business writer Frances Cairncross. Under the heading of Communities of Practice, he quotes, "The horizontal bonds among people performing the same job or speaking the same language in different parts of the world will strengthen. Common interests, experiences, and pursuits rather than proximity will bind these communities together."

The U.K./U.S. symposium is actually just the most visible part of Peterson's role in the global fire service. In 1998, he was elected president of the USA Branch of the Institution of Fire Engineers, a United Kingdom-based organization that was one of the symposium's sponsors, and more recently was elected to the ife's International Council.

With a first-class fire department and plenty to keep him busy, Peterson, 54, says he's "having too much fun" to retire. (The fact that he's an faa-licensed hot-air balloon pilot who occasionally gets to fly the department's balloon must help.) "As long as I can continue to keep up with the young pups, I'll be here."