Fire Chief Danny Wilkerson won authorization Wednesday night to hire an assistant chief, a joint city-county position that has been vacant since Ronnie Lassiter retired June 1 last year.
Wilkerson had repeatedly pressed City Manager Eric Williams and the City Council since June to let him fill the post. Not only is it standard for a municipal fire department to have an assistant chief, Wilkerson told the Finance and Intergovernmental Relations Committee at a meeting Wednesday, but it’s mandated in the fire services contract the Henderson has with Vance County.
Under that contract, the county pays $115,000 a year for Wilkerson and other city employees to run the county Fire Department as well. In theory, Finance Director Traig Neal said, leaving that post vacant could give the county an opening to ask for $30,000 back.
“So we spend $6,000 this fiscal year to save 30 (thousand),” FAIR Chairman Bernard Alston said. “It almost seems stupid not to do it.”
Under a proposal Wilkerson sent to City Manager Eric Williams in February, the cost of promoting one of three captains to assistant chief and of making three other promotions as the effect cascaded down the ranks would be $6,124 through the end of the fiscal year June 30. The actual cost should be lower because it’s already a month later and because it will take a couple of weeks to prepare an eligibility list ranking the captains and lieutenants for promotion.
The series of promotions would leave the Fire Department with a surplus of nearly $7,000 in its salary budget for the current fiscal year.
City Council sentiment moved toward hiring an assistant chief in recent months, despite Williams’ reluctance to spend the money and to open the council to a flurry of departmental requests to fill vacant or frozen positions. Departments from police to planning to recreation have unfilled positions that hamper operations but are beyond a balanced budget.
“The fire study says we need it, you say we need it, we stand to lose $24,000 if we don’t do it — have I misstated anything yet?” council member Elissa Yount said.
Alston said she had the situation right, especially in terms of the money.
The fire chief set his situation apart from the other departments with some financial creativity and the willingness to give up an entry-level firefighter position to get the assistant chief, council member John Wester said. He also said the county should have no complaints about the fire service contract because all of the required work was done, even if five people had to pick up the load and Wilkerson had to put in 10 24-hour workdays in the past year.
“Most of the public concern is simply getting the service,” Williams said. “How we end up getting it to them” doesn’t matter.
Wilkerson said the assistant chief makes a big difference in the quality of administration in the department and in the easing of stress and crisis-level workloads. He said the assistant chief would be a big help now while the county’s human resources director is turning that side of fire operations upside down.
The assistant chief provides a crucial backup in case something happens to the chief, Wilkerson said, joking about the consequences if he got into a wreck while driving home.
Yount said the promotions also should boost morale in the Fire Department.
Wilkerson’s proposal involves four promotions, and the increase in the city’s costs for salaries and benefits for those four firefighters will be $14,284. The salary of the frozen firefighter position is $23,555, so the net effect would be a budget savings.
Williams reminded the council members that he sees a link between the assistant chief position and the possible creation and enforcement of a maintenance code for commercial buildings. If the General Assembly passes legislation enabling such a code in Henderson, and if the City Council then enacts an ordinance, Williams wants the Fire Department to handle the resulting code inspections.
But that’s a matter of controversy that was not directly related to Wednesday’s discussion of filling the vacant position, and the council members did not address code enforcement.
All five council members at the meeting — Alston, Wester, Yount, Mary Emma Evans and Lonnie Davis — approved of letting Wilkerson proceed with his promotion plan, rather than wait until a budget work session with the chief April 5 or the regular council meeting April 11.
After one captain is promoted from the position of battalion commander to assistant chief, for a raise of about $5,000, one lieutenant will move into that battalion commander/captain slot and receive a salary increase likely to exceed $2,700. Wilkerson could not say who will get those promotions because he has not prepared an eligibility list for each job yet.
Tim Twisdale is in line for a promotion to fill the resulting gap in the lieutenant ranks, and William Boyd is due to replace Twisdale as a fire engineer. Each will get a pay increase in the neighborhood of $2,000.
Evans asked about the possibility of a minority firefighter filling the assistant chief position, and Wilkerson said it’s not going to happen this time. All three captains in the department are white.
Wilkerson said he should have minority candidates eligible to move up to captain. The department’s lieutenants will have to go through an assessment center and testing to create a ranked eligibility list.
Williams said that because upper-level Fire Department positions almost always are filled by promotion rather than outside hiring, “the way you ensure a more diverse staff at the top … is addressing it at the bottom first.”
Two of his captains have 38 years’ experience, Wilkerson said, and the other has 29 years.
“The problem is getting people to apply to be firefighters,” Davis said. He said he was denied the opportunity to be a firefighter in his younger days, but now that everyone has the opportunity, too many see it as a dead end.