Philip Sayer, Fire Chief magazine's Volunteer Fire Chief of Year and Missouri's 2003 Fire Chief of the Year, started out just helping his neighbors in 1966, when he established the fire department in Galt, Mo. Since then, his help-thy-neighbor policy has spread — considerably.

Sayer has been a driving force in the development of the state's firefighter training, particularly in developing classes for rural firefighters. He's credited with successfully lobbying for laws to benefit all Missouri firefighters and with helping to establish a state memorial for fallen firefighters. Active on the national front as well, he was involved in the push to establish and implement the federal Assistance to Firefighters Grant Program and personally eyeballed thousands of grant applications from fire departments across the nation to help the U.S. Fire Administration dole out the grants.

The owner of a 2,500-acre row-crop farm and construction business in Galt, Sayer is not one to put on airs. “I was raised on a farm, and I have a construction company. We run bulldozers and earth-moving equipment,” he says, with an earthy drawl. “I grew up in Trenton, which is just 15 miles from where I live now. I've been here all my life.” Sayer also helps operate a gold-mine operation with his brother in Alaska and has visited it just about every summer since 1973.

Dedicated resources

Galt is a community in the north-central part of the state, about 110 miles north of Kansas City. Mostly cattle ranchers and corn and soybean farmers sparsely populate it. After a few fires hit in the 1960s, Sayer started the Galt Fire Department as a civic project for the Lion's Club. The department separated from the Lion's Club about four years later, but it ran entirely on donations for more than 20 years. In 1991, citizens overwhelmingly approved a new fire protection tax to fund the department and to expand the district across three counties, a total of 187 square miles, renaming it the Galt Fire Protection District.

Sayer's story will have a familiar ring to most volunteer fire chiefs. The total population of the fire district is fewer than a thousand, he says. The department has 27 members, ranging from ages 20 to 65, and 10 junior firefighters, ages 14 to 18. It's all-volunteer in every respect: “No one's been paid a dime since we were established in 1966,” says Sayer. “As a matter of fact, we sometimes pay our own expenses for our training, and that's not unusual for a volunteer department.”

All the same, the fire department is a strong part of the community. It's the hub, the place where people in the community gather not just for fire department activities, but also for family reunions and town events. And it's not just “a guy thing,” says Sayer. “We have entire families that belong to the fire department — the husband, the wife and the kid in the junior fire department. It's been a good thing. It's a community spirit — type thing.”

That community spirit enables Sayer to run the department on a meager budget of $27,000 a year. Of that money, 45% goes to pay for insurance “right off the top,” Sayer says. “So when you pay for that and buy a little gas for your trucks, it doesn't leave much.”

He and his volunteers manage to maintain a fleet of seven apparatus, all purchased used, of course: two pumpers (vintage 1968 and 1978), a 1978 2,500-gallon tanker, two brush trucks, one rescue equipment truck and a van for EMS calls.

They're an all-hazard response force, responding to a few fires, but mostly vehicle extrication, farm rescue and EMS calls. Two members are paramedics, nine are EMTs and the rest are trained to first-responder level.

“We're about the only people that are available for any kind of emergency,” says Sayer. “We don't even have an ambulance in our town, so we run first responder units with EMS for medical problems. We've done that for several years. Our EMS van is equipped with everything that an ambulance is equipped with.”

In praise of FIRE grants

Sayer was thrilled to receive the news that his department won a federal FIRE grant for $47,000 in July. The funds will help the department purchase an air compressor and bunker gear and SCBA, the first new PPE his firefighters will ever wear. “It's very, very basic stuff,” he says, “but we're not unusual. Most small fire departments cannot afford the latest NFPA-rated equipment — ours for one. A lot of small departments go around to the large departments and get their hand-me-downs.”

He considers the FIRE grant program “one of the greatest things to ever happen to the fire service. It's probably one of the only federal grant programs that I have ever known that has worked excellent. The bulk of the money gets directly to the fire department. The department doesn't have to go through a state organization, where they'll peel off 25% for handling it.”

As a former FIRE grant peer reviewer, Sayer became personally familiar with the needs of thousands of departments across the nation. “It's just absolutely phenomenal what the need is out there, and the amount of money that some departments have,” he says. “We have a lot of departments, many in our area that run on a budget of $10,000 a year, complete.”

State leadership

Sayer has instructed firefighters from across the state as an adjunct instructor at the University of Missouri's Fire & Rescue Training Institute for 25 years. He developed many of the institute's programs and has a special interest in training for the kinds of incidents faced by rural firefighters, such as farm, big-rig and grain-bin rescue, and school-bus extrication.

Sayer's interest isn't only in volunteers. The list of committees and boards on which he is active is long. He has been on the board of directors of the Firefighters Association of Missouri for 26 years, as well as on the board of the Missouri Association of Fire Districts and the Missouri Fallen Firefighters Memorial Committee.

Missouri State Fire Marshal William Farr credits Sayer with helping to pass a state law in 1995 that created the Fire Education Commission, providing proceeds from insurance premiums to fund no-cost fire training throughout the state. Gov. Mel Carnahan appointed Sayer to chair the commission. “Phil has been the driving force behind this funding and continues to strive to bring more funds that will allow for more low-cost training,” says Farr. Sayer is trying to get the Missouri legislature to revisit the bill's language to appropriate more funds to the Fire Education Commission and to create new state grant programs to fund needed equipment.

“I have seen Phil drive many hours, away from his family, away from his job, not only coming to the state capital, but anywhere across the state to assist firefighters in their needs,” Farr says. “To my knowledge, Phil has declined to receive any funds for this endeavor as well as for his travel expenses to instruct training classes when asked.”

The National Volunteer Fire Council nominated Sayer for the Volunteer Chief of the Year award. Sayer has served as director of the Missouri chapter of the National Volunteer Fire Council since 1979 and has been on its executive committee since 1995.

“During his time with NVFC, Chief Sayer was a participant in the Stonebridge Conference, a benchmark meeting that fostered the spirit of volunteerism across the country,” says Fred Allinson, former NVFC chairman and past Volunteer Chief of the Year. “He is a true grassroots volunteer fire chief and a national fire service leader, drawing on his experience from Galt, Mo.”

Sen. Chris Bond (Mo.), chair of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee that funded FEMA until the creation of the Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee, also added a support for Sayer's nomination. “Over the last two years, I've had the opportunity to get to know Phil on a personal level as he joined me at many stops on my First Responder Tour of Missouri,” Bond wrote in a letter of support to the selection committee. “With Phil by my side, advising and deciphering concerns of the fire community, we were able to construct a strong legislative agenda to assist the fire services, including making the case to increase the FIRE Grant program from $100 million to $750 million in 2003.”

Family affair

Sayer's dedication to fire service issues is well-understood by his family. Sayer's wife, Roberta, also is active as a member of the fire district's auxiliary and the state auxiliary organization. His stepson, Terry Wynne, helps Sayer run the farm and is assistant chief of the Galt Fire Protection District; his daughter, Caryee Smith, is a school teacher in Warrensburg, Mo., and is married to a firefighter at Whiteman Air Force Base.

“Some people fish, some people go hunting and some people go camping. The wife and I play with fire departments for a hobby,” Sayer says. “And we have met so many people all over the nation, and money can't buy that. We have so many friends, there's hardly any place that we go that we can't stop by the fire station and say ‘hi.’ To me that's worth it all.”

Many people have have helped him along the way. “There is such a list of people, I hesitate. It could go on and on,” Sayer says. But three people stand out as mentors: Bill Westoff, director of the Missouri Fire & Rescue Training Institute for many years (“Bill Westoff is for sure the reason I started to be an instructor, and that's when I started to spread out, as far as what I've done”); Steve Paulsell, the chief of Boone County Volunteer Fire Department, which, with more than 400 volunteers in 14 stations in central Missouri, is considered the largest volunteer fire department in the nation; and Joe Jackson, chief of Carrollton (Mo.) Fire Department, who helped Sayer start the Galt Fire Department.

After 37 years of service to his neighbors as fire chief, Sayer says he will be turning over the reigns to someone else soon. And no doubt one day, he'll look back on this year as one of his finest. Winning fire chief of the year for his state and his nation is pretty high cotton for an old farm boy, he says, his voice thick with pride. “The old boy says it just don't get any better than that!”

For all the things the fire service has given to Sayer, he has one more thing to give back. His message to other fire chiefs and those who aspire to be chiefs goes to the heart of the matter: “One, you gotta love your work. You gotta be dedicated, and above all — and I get teary-eyed on this one — you've got to love people. You've got to want to do what you're doing. You do it for one reason and one reason only, and that's to help people in your community. And that can spread a long way.”

FROM TRAGEDY TO TRAINING

Sayer shares the perspective of the vast majority of America's fire chiefs who lead small volunteer or combination departments. Small-town departments are the least likely targets of a terrorist attack, but that doesn't mean it can't happen, he says. Sayer hasn't forgotten that the fire department that initially responded on Sept. 11 to Flight 93's crash in a field near Shanksville, Pa., was a rural 20-member, volunteer department very similar to his.

“I think a lot of us thought it can't happen to us, and then all at once we woke up to the fact that maybe it can,” he says. “I think it made us all more aware of the business we are in. It doesn't make any difference whether you are paid or volunteer; we are all in the same business. Our customers are the people that we deal with. It drove home the importance of our job and the dangers of our job.”

What happened was a terrible tragedy, but it improved our nation's fire departments, large and small, in many ways, he says. Are Galt firefighters — who are much more likely to respond to a grain-bin or farm-equipment accident than a terrorist incident — any better prepared to respond to terrorism than they were two years ago?

“Yes, we are,” he says. “We will never be a number-one department that would be called to terrorism incidents, but I think that if we should have something happen here, whether it be something at our school or an airplane falling out of the sky, I know we're better prepared physically, and I think we're better equipped equipment-wise than we were before.”