The Fire Chief’s Blog

A cold day to test our new Fire/Rescue boat last Friday, but that was the date selected a few weeks ago when it appeared the weather would never cool off. Well Friday came and it wasn’t all that nice, but as they say in Hollywood, the show must go on. Assistant Chiefs Koering and Taylor made the trip to Red Wing, Mn to open water and gave the boat a workout. Everything went well with a few minor exceptions, another trial will take place this week or early next week.
We will have the boat ready for action on our local lakes and waterways by the time the ice leaves us. Click the thumbnail to enlarge.

Since the early 1900’s in Minnesota there has been a fire insurance tax imposed on every property casualty policy written in Minnesota. The purpose of the tax was to fund a strong and active State Fire Marshal’s Office. Over the course of time some of the revenues generated by this tax have been rerouted to the State’s General Fund for use on other projects and simply to help balance the State’s budget. The continual reduction of the actual funds going to their original purpose has resulted in a grossly under funded State Fire Marshal’s Office.

Last year the fire service as a whole got together and proposed an new strategy that would get funds going to where there were supposed to go. For many reasons last years initiative didn’t get too far at the legislature. The fire service redoubled their efforts this Spring, Summer and Fall and have now introduced a new initiative to fix the problem long-term. The initiative is called the Fire Safety Account and will direct funds to a variety of worthwhile life safety programs. The new initiative abolishes the old tax strategy and replaces it with a more politically palatable fee structure. The fire Safety Account will be directed by the Commissioner of Public Safety with strong input from a fire service advisory committee. Funds will generally be directed to a series of important programs such as: The Fire Marshal’s Office, State Hazardous Materials Response Teams, Firefighter Training, Structural collapse Teams and funding to beef up the BCA’s ability to assist the fire service with investigations to name a few. These are all very important programs in the times we live in today.

I hope you will be able to join me in supporting this legislative effort. Contact your local legislators, and urge them to support this bill. You can review the bill for yourself by clicking here.

I’ve installed the blogging platform WordPress here for George’s weblog and imported all his previous entries from the past. Let me know if you discover any glitches.

Just when you thought you’d seen it all this situation arises. Without going into all the details, our Fire Marshal was summoned to a single family house in an established part of our city. Neighbors alerted him to a house without windows or doors and snow accumulating inside.

To make a long story short this property is in a dispute and somebody came in and removed all the doors, windows, furnace and even the stair treads!

Our Fire Marshal along with our Building Official took action and had the home secured and are working with the mortgage holder to get the situation resolved. Property rights issues are always sticky, but our mission is to get the house into a safe condition for the neighbors and get the structure back into a condition so it can be used again. We don’t see this very often in our city, but we have the tools to get it resolved in accordance with the legal remedies available to us.

Earlier this week I participated in the interview process for the Eagan Fire Department’s first full-time Fire Chief position. The move to a full-time Chief is getting more and more common in the Minnesota fire service, we did it about 3 1/2 years ago. Eagan Fire has done their homework, gotten buy-in from their entire department and appears ready for the change.

I spent all day Tuesday and part of Wednesday interviewing 9 excellent candidates for the position. On the panel with me were Eagan’s City Manager, Human resources Manager, Communications Manager, Deputy Police Chief and three Eagan firefighters. The interview panel was step one for the candidates, in a three step process.

I completely enjoyed my experience, especially getting to know the firefighters from Eagan Fire. Being on the west side of the Minnesota River, I haven’t had a lot of interaction with my colleagues from the east side of the river. It will be interesting to see who gets the job of leading Eagan Fire into the future.