Jessica Cejnar Andrews / Today at 4:38 p.m. / Community, Emergencies, Local Government
Crescent Fire & Rescue Begins Recruitment for Fire Captain Positions
Don Olson greets spectators at the July 4, 2021 parade in a Crescent Fire & Rescue truck. | File photo: Jessica C. Andrews
Crescent City Fire & Rescue began recruiting three fire captains this week, fulfilling a goal that city councilors said impossible without Measure S – the 1% sales tax that is to be repealed in the Nov. 8 ballot.
The department is aiming to hire three captains who would work two days on and four days off, rotating every other day, Fire Chief Kevin Carey told advisers Monday. Once hired, these captains will be the only paid employees of Crescent City Fire and Rescue, with the exception of the fire chief. Fire captains will respond to everything from medical and fire emergencies to assisting with inspections, community education programs like CPR training and even reinstating the department’s Explorer program, Carey said.
“As we know, staffing is long overdue. We don’t have a sustainable fire service as it is now,’ he told councillors. “We just can’t keep (managing) the increase in appeals with just volunteers, so this is truly a historic and exciting time for this city and this department.”
Councilors voted 4-0-1 in favor of a resolution setting base salaries, benefits and other terms of employment for career fire captain positions. Because this is a new classification of employees within the city, it’s up to the council to establish those parameters, city attorney Martha Rice said.
Councilor Beau Smith recused himself. Earlier this year, at a meeting of the Measure S oversight committee, Smith said he planned to apply for one of the fire captain positions.
Until they organize their employee association to engage in collective bargaining, the position of career fire captain is currently not represented, Rice said. Their annual salary will range from $65,631 to $79,744 and they will receive pension, health and life insurance benefits through the CalPERS system.
On October 13, the Crescent Fire Protection District also unanimously approved the salaries, benefits and terms of employment for the three career fire captain positions. Hiring the fire captains also wouldn’t have been possible without the district’s benefits assessment that was successful last year, Crescent City Mayor Jason Greenough said.
Former fire chief Steve Wakefield, who was forced into retirement following a stroke and died in 2019, saw the need to combine the Crescent City Fire Department and the district of Crescent Fire Protection in 2005. This merger became official about 10 years later with the two jurisdictions. creation of Crescent City Fire & Rescue.
After Wakefield’s retirement, the city and fire district began work on a master plan that set out long-term strategies to sustain the service whose volunteers answered about 2,000 calls for service a year, said the city manager Eric Wier. Both jurisdictions adopted the master plan in November 2019.
Crescent City Fire & Rescue began advertising career fire captain positions on Tuesday, with the application period ending Nov. 21, Carey said. Candidate interviews will take place in early December — Carey said her department will assemble teams of interview panels. He said the CCF&R hopes to make conditional offers around mid-December.
Although captains are paid, Carey said the position’s name was changed from “Captain II” to “Career Fire Captain” to better integrate them into a department that will still be primarily staffed by volunteers.
“What we want is for them to be on equal footing with our volunteer captains,” Carey said, adding that department battalion chiefs had been instrumental in the process of creating the new captain positions. “Organizationally, they will be trained the same way. They are going to be the same organizationally.
Carey said he hopes the addition of fire captains will have real-world impacts right away.
“The community is going to see real changes with this,” he said. “We can offer community training related to these positions, like school education programs – teaching CPR, fire safety courses, the Explorer program that we can restart on a regular basis.”
Captains can provide fire extinguisher training to businesses and can help with inspections, reporting the information needed to their colleagues to respond to a fire at a particular structure, Carey said.
Greenough and Councilor Blake Inscore applauded the resolution, with Inscore calling the milestone historic. They both recognized the S-measure and the benefit assessment.
Greenough, specifically called Measure T, which, if approved on November 8, would eliminate Measure S.
“I really hope that in the near future we don’t have to make these tough decisions about what to fund or what to cut,” he said. “I hope the public thinks about these issues and makes the right decision about what kind of community they want to live in and what kind of service they want to see.”
