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Welcome to the Behind the Shield podcast. As always, my name is James Gearing and this week I have an unusual episode for you.
It is actually the recording of the live Q&A that I hosted at the Florida Fire Chiefs Association, along with the Florida Firefighter Health and Safety Collaborative in Kissimmee, Florida.
On the panel was Joel Billings, who is a researcher into sleep and shifts in the fire service.
Dixon Phillips, president of Pasco County, who are in the process of going to the 2472.
Chief Hugh Bruder, chief of Boynton Beach Fire, and they went to the 2472 almost two years ago.
And Chief Sean Hillhouse, who is a deputy fire chief of Gainesville Fire Rescue, who recently went to the 2472.
So I posed multiple questions that I know people wanted answered.
How did they afford it? What was the need in the first place? What about the recruitment crisis? What have you seen since you've gone to it?
And it was incredibly powerful hearing all of these different voices from these different positions.
There was an audience Q&A at the end, but I'm not allowed to air that because the people asking the questions weren't aware that it was going to be shared.
So the Florida Fire Chiefs Association has asked me to keep that part out.
So I hope this serves as an incredible resource for anyone else who's in the process of considering it and trying to make this proactive change in their own fire department.
Before we get to the conversation, as I say every week, please just take a moment.
Go to whichever app you listen to this on, subscribe to the show, leave feedback and leave a rating.
Every single five star rating truly does elevate this podcast, therefore making it easier for others to find.
And this is a free library of over 1000 episodes now.
So all I ask in return is that you help share these incredible men and women stories
so I can get them to every single person on planet Earth who needs to hear them.
So with that being said, I introduce the 24 72 Q&A. Enjoy.
All right. Well, I want to thank you all first for attending. I know the title is a little dubious as to what this is going to be about.
I started my podcast. I'm going to do introductions for every single person. So I'll start with me.
I was a firefighter for 14 years, 10 years into my career, as I'm sure a lot of people can relate to.
I started going to funerals and so started a podcast to find the experts in all kinds of topics and bring them to everyone who needs the solutions.
You know, every problem has an answer as a solution.
When I dove into this conversation, obviously the shift work was a big element.
And I had neuroscientists and sleep medicine experts from the military.
And this glaring reality came out as, you know, shifts that we do, are they healthy, the unhealthy, which is the right one.
So without loading it too much, this is what we're going to be unpacking is the way that we've always done it.
Is it working or is there a progressive way that we can change that will forge physical and mental health recruitment and save money?
So, Joel, if you want to give your background on it for people that weren't in the last class.
Sure. Joel Billings. I'm an assistant professor at Embry-Riddle Aernockle University,
program chair for the Bachelor of Science in Emergency Services undergrad program.
And my research focuses on sleep, shift schedules and learning systems for firefighters.
Chief. Hi, everybody. Hugh Bruder. I am a 45 year fire service veteran.
I got my start in the U.S. Air Force in the post Vietnam era.
I retired from Miami Dade Fire Rescue in 2015 and I couldn't handle playing so much golf and fishing.
So I decided that I wanted to go back and I am presently the fire chief at Pointon Beach Fire Rescue.
Sean Hillhouse. I'm with Gainesville Fire Rescue.
Been with them for 22 years and this year we actually moved to the 2472 schedule.
Dixon Phillips. I've been with Passive County Fire Rescue for nine years.
I was recently elected president of Local 4420 and was involved in our negotiations for our 2472 schedule.
I'm here to start in 2026.
All right. So I want to play devil's advocate and ask a few questions that I know everyone would want to ask.
And then as we progress through to the end, we can open up to the floor and ask some more questions.
The first one I want to put to the panel is the three gentlemen to the far left, you have moved to a 2472.
So let's start with what is the problem. We'll start with you, Joel, from the research point of view.
from the physical health, mental health,
financial recruitment, from a researcher's point of view,
what have you been exposed to as the issue
in the fire service?
In relation to 2472, that's one area that has
virtually no research so far.
That's obviously, we're trying to change that,
especially with a growing number of departments
that are considering it, and the potential benefits
that it could have with the just 24 hour shift.
And if they are overtime or swapping shifts,
it would be a 48 hour schedule
without really reducing the recovery time.
So there's a lot of questions that are open
in that particular schedule.
But with mental health and,
I'm not sure what other one you mentioned.
All the health.
Oh, all the health.
Shift schedules are an interesting and complex system
in the fire service.
So there is not really one best schedule.
I've learned, or come to learn that through a variety of ways.
But it's not gonna be what's the best schedule out there.
It's gonna be what's the best schedule
for your particular department.
And it may be what's the best schedule
for your particular station within your department.
All right, Hugh, as far as the issue,
before you decided to make the change,
what were you seeing in all the elements
that initiated the discussion to change the shift schedule?
Well, I think it's a very interesting discussion
because this really shouldn't just be
about shift schedules, right?
It's not just about the 2472s or the 4896s.
That's why we're all here today.
Because we're concerned about the mental health
and wellbeing and safety of the members
who are out there serving the public.
So if you look at it from a large perspective,
shift schedule changes are but one
of the many, many, many things
as chief officers we have to look at.
And of course, as a fire chief,
it's my responsibility to carry that forward,
not only within my membership, but how do I achieve that?
So in looking at this big picture
and looking at what we see right now
throughout the fire services,
a lot of fire departments are having a very difficult time
hiring and maintaining firefighter paramedics.
So I'm very proud to say we're 100% paramedic
fire department, and that's taken us several years
to get to that point.
That's just an ancillary benefit to what we're doing.
But the bigger picture is you have to look
at every one of these things we're talking about,
whether it's equipment, whether it's personnel,
whether it's your sleep schedule,
whether it's any of these things we look at,
mental health and behavioral health.
These are but cogs on this wheel.
And as chiefs, how do we facilitate that?
So the only way we're gonna be able to facilitate that
is by being able to stand up at the dais
within your community, within your municipality,
to be able to dialogue with your elected officials
and with the individuals who are above you
at a much higher pay grade who are non-uniform wearing.
You know, as they say, everyone that wears a uniform
answers to a civilian, well, we do.
But my job as the fire chief is to not only run
the fire department, not only create the best environment
for the members within my department,
but how do I sustain that department
for many, many years in the future?
So I believe there's many factors that we looked at
with Boynton Beach Fire Rescue to do what I call
turn Boynton Beach into a destination fire department.
And when we put out for job hires,
we have more than we need.
We get hundreds of applicants for these positions.
So I know now we're doing a good job
at going out there and getting them
because we've laid all these things out there.
But at the essence, at the core of anything that we do,
it's communication and it's understanding
and it's educating not only the public,
but it's educating your bosses
and it's educating the elected officials.
So how do we do that?
We do that through an understanding of how we plan.
We must plan for the future.
So strategic planning is an extremely important part
of this large process.
So as I go into strategic planning over the next three,
five, seven or 10 years, I can begin to look at this.
Let me give you a quick example
and then obviously I'll turn it on.
I'll turn it over.
So in looking at your shift schedule change,
you have to say, well, what am I at now?
If I have no Kelly days and I'm at a 56 hour work week,
you're not gonna go to 24 72
unless you have a massive influx of cash.
It's gonna be very difficult for you to do that.
If you're working a 24 48 schedule now
and you have a Kelly day,
that's a lot more easy to achieve
because your Kelly day is your largest leave liability.
So at that point, you are able to calculate
how many firefighters I need based on the fact
that now I'm eliminating the Kelly day.
So in Boynton Beach with five stations
and 160 people in operations, we had to hire 21 people,
not what would normally have been about 38 people.
And so within that, there are other considerations.
How much gear do you need?
Do you have a fourth locker in each of your stations?
So there's a tremendous amount of ancillary expenses
that are involved in this process.
But again, you have to be able to educate.
You're never gonna get,
you're not even being able to get a third person
on your rescue truck if you're running two person rescues.
If you can't communicate the needs
to your elected officials as to what we need,
and that's through proper strategic planning
where we help these individuals understand
that public safety should be the number one concern
of any municipality in this country,
if not the world.
So I'll leave it at that
and wait till I have another opportunity.
So our two biggest problems that we were trying to address
were safety and retention.
And one of the questions that we asked ourselves is,
how many hours continuously is it safe for employees to work?
And even though we were on a 24, 48 schedule
with mandatory overtime,
that's not what everybody was working.
So routinely people were working 48 to 72 hours straight,
you throw one trade in there,
now we're up at 96.
And as a chief officer,
can I really say that that's safe?
And the answer was no.
So that really got us started with
what we could do to change that.
And the other thing is retention.
How do we make the department attractive
to get new recruits in there?
And we started by simply asking,
and our younger firefighters,
and right now our department's 75% is under the age of 30.
So we have a very young fire department.
We asked them, what's important?
Would you like us to improve the retirement,
improve the pay?
And surprising to me,
because I'm not from that generation,
what they said was, we want more time off.
So that's where we started,
is how can we address the safety factor
and make the job what the employee was looking for?
I would say the same for us in Pasco County.
We had a big recruitment and retention problem.
Fiscal year 22 and 23,
we lost 162 firefighters from our agency.
Fiscal year 22 had 80,000 hours of mandatory overtime.
Fiscal year 23 was 45,000.
We're talking $8.6 million in those two years,
just in overtime costs.
On top of the health aspect, the mental health aspect.
And we had a lot of our members,
the biggest thing also was more time off.
Went from a 56 hour work week,
transitioned to a six week in 2017,
knowing that the ultimate goal was to get to a three week,
really didn't have any numbers or other departments
that we were talking to that had 2472s.
But we knew that we had to put that stepping stone in place
for us to get down to what we were going for.
Originally it was a three week Kelly Day.
Since we have agreed on our contract going to 2472s,
we've lost six, six firefighters.
Most of them moved out of state.
This last new hire class that starts next week,
we had 259 applicants for 24 seats.
We went from an agency three years ago
that we weren't able to be selective.
Basically, if you had a pulse and you came to the interview,
you receive a job.
Now we can truly be selective.
And of those 24 new hires,
20 of them are coming from other agencies.
So it definitely changed the culture
and it hasn't even started yet.
I wanna ask Joel a question.
You did an entire presentation just before this.
We had a conversation on the podcast
and you kind of unpacked the study
that you did on the 4896.
Talk to me about the kind of department
that that would be applicable to
and any warnings you have of that data being interpreted by,
for example, a very busy inner city department.
Yeah, so for the department that switched
from the 2448 to the 4896,
they had department-wide about 5,000 calls annually,
four stations and about 80 firefighters.
So in Oklahoma, that's considered
a medium-sized department.
Calls during the day per individual was about 1.2.
And then calls at night was about 1.2,
a little bit less than 1.
So for that particular sample,
they weren't very busy at night.
And so the question,
and we have a study that's about to start looking at
call burden and sleep and how,
or what is an ideal number?
Maybe it's a formula or it's a specific number of,
okay, this scheduling system or this duration of work
is not safe for a particular firefighter.
Obviously that's gonna be very personalized
to someone who can manage or handle that particular load
versus someone that maybe can't handle it.
And then the one, if I remember rightly,
the one takeaway where you saw the benefit of the 48
was that second shift,
that firefighter isn't having to wake up at five
in the morning to go to the station.
Yep, yeah, cause if you remember on the two slides
that we looked at day by day,
the commute days had the same sleep duration.
And so that was like 5.6 hours going to work
and then coming home.
Working the 48 hours overnight,
instead of commuting,
they were able to reallocate that to sleep time.
And so that's what bumped up their score a little bit.
It wasn't enough to draw
statistically significant differences,
what we'd say,
but it was enough meaningful for that particular department
since those firefighters needed sleep
with just even one call a night.
They were still less than the average hours of sleep
per National Sleep Foundation.
That brought in that question of the shift start time.
And so we're looking or thinking about
whether that is equally or if not more important
than the actual shift schedule,
especially early morning times
where their sleep is truncated,
waking up at 5.30 in the morning versus waking up at 7.30.
As we think about that in a week or that within a tour,
now that's four or six or eight hours of sleep debt
that someone is getting weekly
within that particular schedule.
So that may have a more impact
than the actual shift schedule.
Because like I said,
there's departments can implement safety measures
to help countermeasure some of those
depending on what they're going on
in that particular department.
I wanna send this down the line,
I just kinda wanna highlight having worked,
if the benefit of not having to wake up
at five in the morning and then drive to the station,
which I did my whole career,
usually about an hour and a half drive,
then it kinda makes me question
well, why do we start at 7.30 or eight in the morning?
What if we started at 11 a.m., 12 noon,
we would glean the advantage that you found in your study,
but then you add that to, for example, the 24 72,
now that's two birds with one stone.
You've got a firefighter that's at home,
wakes up, has breakfast with their children,
spends time with their loved one, then goes to work,
they've missed the rush hour.
The person who was on the rig that night who got hammered,
dispatch doesn't have to wake him up
at seven or eight in the morning,
they can actually sleep in.
So then by the time they're relieved,
now they're not gonna end up careening off I-4
because they're so exhausted trying to drive home.
So that's my personal opinion,
I think it's a great conversation and it's completely free.
What if we just started later and why did we start at eight?
I'm gonna send that down to Hugh next
and then kind of get your opinion on that idea.
Well, yeah, I would be open to anything that could help
improve the lives of the men and women
who serve my community.
So if the data points to that being better for my members,
then I'm all for it.
I would actually like to see, continue your data
into the 24 72 and actually with fire departments
in a running very high call volume.
When I left Miami-Dade Fire Rescue,
I mean, when I was on a unit was many, many years ago,
but my sons are there right now,
my wife retired from there and I can tell you,
you're typically every single unit probably
averaging 15 calls per shift
for both the suppression and the rescue.
So now if you were, and I'm just relaying that
to the 48 hour shift, I mean, that would be absolute misery
and we've all done it, who are out there working swaps
and you work 20 calls and then you go,
oh gosh, I got to do a payback
and then I'm doing another 20 calls
and then now it's just, it's horrendous.
So I would really love to see some new studies done
with larger departments or departments
that have that higher call volume,
but I think that that change in work time
would be fantastic if it worked out.
I'll play a little bit of devil's advocate with that.
So, the biggest stressors that I see out of our workforce
isn't actually fighting fires or going to EMS calls.
I see them deal with that very well.
One of the biggest stressors that I see
is getting off in the morning to be able to take children
to school or take over childcare.
And so, it's a wicked problem.
There's not an easy solution for that
because it's not just the firefighter
that you're dealing with.
You also have to deal with the other family members
that are doing that.
So, if we just need to look at how we are adjusting that.
So, for the crew that's holding over until noon
to be able to get off, they lose that ability
to help their spouse with that childcare.
One group gains a little bit more,
but it hurts the other one.
So, I would just say we have to make sure
that we're looking at that from a holistic family standpoint
on what's gonna be good.
Otherwise, it creates stress in other ways.
I would say the same thing.
We actually sent a survey out two years ago
asking about changing the start time from 8 a.m. to 10.
And that was a lot of the feedback that we received
from our members was the issues with childcare
and getting their kids to school
and getting home in time so that their spouses
could go to work.
That was why we decided to kind of stay
where we're at at 8 a.m.
But if we can find a solution to the problem,
that'd be great.
And I'm with Chief Breuder as well.
We have a very busy department.
The station I'm at right now is the busiest in the county
and I would love to sleep in.
So, if we could get the time pushed back to noon,
the six calls after midnight allow me
to at least get a couple hours of sleep
before I can drive home.
So, definitely open to any research that comes our way.
There are, so the selection of a specific time,
that's gonna be, again, individual to the department.
Based on local area of like traffic, for example,
because you don't wanna now be stuck in traffic two hours
and you have to wake up the same time.
That defeats the entire purpose.
If they're able to, so if they dropped off kids
or picked up a kid at, when they got off at work
at eight o'clock, then ideally we'd pick a time
that they would then be able to drop off the child
and then go into work.
So, it's the complete opposite then.
You just don't wanna pick a time where it's right
in the middle where they can't do either.
Because then otherwise they're saying,
hey, can you come in half hour early
so that I can do that.
That's the trickier part.
All right, well, I'm sure the big question
that most people wanna ask is how are we gonna afford
to go to a 2472?
We'll start with the finance first
and then obviously we'll get into the recruitment crisis
and all the other questions that I get a lot.
So, I don't know if you have any kind of input for that,
Joel, as far as where you've seen money kind of being lost,
the way that we're doing it now,
versus a proactive approach?
Not, I mean, that's a little bit outside of my area.
The one presentation that I did back in,
it was in Arizona, the chief didn't mention that.
What they're able to do is save on overtime
by hiring additional two people,
is what they did for that particular department
and saved on overtime.
That's the only thing that I am familiar with.
Okay.
So.
Well, I guess I was gonna, with any of you guys,
what was the losses that you were seeing
if you have that data, I know Dixon, you do,
and then let's talk about, for example, Boynton,
have you seen financial gains since?
Yeah, so when we initially started,
and again, I go back to a five station,
160 person, smaller-ish Florida Fire Department,
but we were seeing numbers of about $2.5 million a year
in overtime, where we were typically budgeting
five to 800,000 a year for overtime.
So with those kind of numbers, and again,
as the fire chief or cheerleader in charge,
my job has many hats, and one of those is to make sure
that we're being extremely fiscally responsible
with what we're doing, because if you want buy-in
by our elected officials in your senior city
or municipal staff, you need to be able to put your money
where your mouth is.
So although we don't like to say
the fire service is revenue generating,
we do generate revenue, and it is a huge part of what we do,
and I've been able to get tremendous amount of respect
by showing that I am concerned about the generation
of revenue, not to the degradation of my members
or to the department.
But to answer the question, essentially,
by hiring these extra individuals,
which for us was about $1.3 million in the first year,
but we had literally went from $2.3 million in overtime
down to $800,000 in overtime.
So year one, we saw a net savings.
Now, if you talk to Boca Raton Fire Rescue,
who has been doing this for many, many years,
we were actually the second fire department in the country
to do it, but Boca will tell you, over a 30-year period,
that their sick time usage wound up going right back
to where it was before.
So their sick time usage, you can't stand up and say,
well, sick time is going to be great forever,
because statistically, Boca has shown that it's not.
I can tell you, we're in year three right now of the 2472,
and our overtime is kicking back up.
Our sick leave is kicking back up now.
We went through some contract negotiations,
and I put some moves in there, because I'm very concerned
about the abuse of sick leave.
If you're sick, take off.
If you're going to abuse it, not in my department.
So we went contractually through,
and we did some things to kind of limit the number of days
and associate discipline to it.
And it's only to affect culture.
I'm not trying to make it difficult for my members,
but we have to look at this big picture of our budgets
and look at what we can do to be able to achieve all
the things that are necessary.
So sick leave is popping back up.
Overtime is starting to pop back up.
And I'm sure in the next three to five years,
we're probably going to be right back where we were.
So then one could say is the argument that 2472, 4896,
10s and 14s, that these things are all
going to be going to save time.
I don't believe that they will.
And I'm just telling you that genuinely
from what I've experienced.
Does that mean it's not a good thing?
No, it's a tremendously good thing for our membership.
And so again, you have to go back
through your strategic planning.
You have to go through your budgeting.
And you have to slowly calculate how
you're going to figure this out and get to the point
where at least you can facilitate
moving your schedule.
Gio, I'm going to jump in one second.
The overtime you're talking about
isn't from vacancies from a recruitment crisis, though.
You are fully staffed.
Is that correct?
No, some of it was.
Some of it was vacancies.
And some of it was we did have a higher
than average number of individuals
that were on family leave or that were on light duty
because of injuries.
That actually, it's something that you
cannot extrapolate that data.
You can be the best data person in the world,
but you have no idea when tomorrow five people are
going to get injured on the job.
And now your overtime goes up because you don't have enough
people in relief because you're just
trying to get your normal staffing every day
to run your calls.
So that's kind of that bigger picture.
Beautiful.
Chief.
I'd say perspective is everything.
So we were in a very similar situation.
We budgeted about $400,000 for overtime per year.
And we were averaging about 2.8.
And that's because our staffing factor was 1.3,
but we were so short that in reality, we were at a one.
And that's what was driving that overtime.
And that wasn't sustainable.
And I'll say that the men and women of our department
sustained that for years.
And when I say they were working 48, 24s,
that's what they were doing.
So we took a very odd approach in that we only
hired two people to move to 24, 72s.
And we took that staffing factor of 1.3,
and we folded it back to a one.
And if I went to the NFA and said,
I have this great idea.
We're going to move our staffing factor to one,
I'd probably be stoned to death.
But essentially, we had been operating like that for years
already.
And we said, OK, how do we make this sustainable?
If this is what we're going to be doing,
how do we make that sustainable?
And the answer was to increase the recovery time
that people had.
So even though we still have a percentage of the department
that's working those 48s, they have those two days
of recovery time now.
And our staffing factor is a one,
but it's an easier pace for the crews to do that.
But it didn't come without a cost.
So whereas originally, we were spending about $2.8 million
on that, we're going to be closer to $4 million.
And we knew that going in.
We knew that this wasn't going to be a cost savings
thing immediately.
This was an improvement to the system
to make our department more attractive to people
and to stop the attrition that we had going on.
In the past five years, we hired 98 people.
And we had about half of those leave.
So our attrition rate was 50% over five years.
And hopefully, some of you out here
have gotten some really great employees
from Gainesville Fire Rescue.
We've been trying to train them as hard as we possibly could.
But for us, that wasn't sustainable.
And that's what required that change.
And we knew that there would be a cost,
but we thought it would be a good investment.
I just want to stay with you again.
So you said you're down to nine employees.
Talk to me about how soon you're going to be fully staffed.
So when we first started talking about moving to 2472s,
we were down 30 positions.
And we took about a year to move through the process
of setting everything up, which was still pretty fast
from our standpoint, because there are a lot of things
we have to do.
And now, we actually switched to a 2472 schedule in August.
And we're down nine positions.
And we'll start our next hiring class in February.
And that should be the first time
that we'll be fully staffed.
Now, again, we moved to that staffing factor of one,
but it's the same number of people.
But we'll be fully staffed for the first time in eight years.
Beautiful.
Ikson.
Yeah, so in Pasco County, over the last 10 years,
we've only had two non-consecutive months
where we hit minimum staffing.
So every day, we were hiring mandatory overtime.
Like I said earlier, in fiscal year 22,
we had 80,000 hours of overtime, which was $5.5 million.
Now, I don't have the number on what the county budgeted,
but that far exceeded it.
In 23, which was after our contract was executed,
we had 45,000 hours of overtime.
So we already had a $2.4 million reduction in overtime cost.
The cost of those 162 firefighters
leaving in those two years was $4.1 million.
So between those three items, the county
had a $13.3 million cost.
The cost to put the D-Shift in place is $13 million.
We did a lot of groundwork with our local county commissioners,
as well as our administration, preaching, obviously,
the health and safety of our members,
on top of being fiscally responsible for the constituents
of our county.
And there were some give and takes in our negotiations.
We did have a reduction in our PTO accrual.
We combined sick and vacation to PTO.
We had a reduction in our PTO accrual of 20%,
which is a reduction of our total hours worked.
Currently, right now, our overtime
does not kick in until 22 hours over your regular schedule.
So there is some short-term savings,
and we also kind of split it over two years.
So this year, half the money was available for them
due to the hiring.
Next year is the same.
And we split the effective is April 6.
So right in the middle of our fiscal year,
to help offset some of those costs
so that we can get this schedule on board.
And a lot of the discussion, too,
was if we went from a six-week Kelly Day, which we got in 2017,
to a three-week Kelly Day, is that
going to solve the problem?
And the answer is no, because we don't make dollar for dollar
what other agencies south of us do.
So we have to be creative.
We have to be the first to the watering hole, right?
That's when everyone's going to come in the door.
And I tell you right now, in the last year,
I mean, it's proven true.
So now we just have to continue to make sure
that it is successful, continues to be successful.
And when everyone else comes to 2472,
figure out what's the next step.
Can I piggyback off of that?
Please.
So I want to piggyback off of that, because as you see,
we've got union leadership and we got fire chiefs up here.
So what I want to also say is, as part of this also larger
picture is, if you are at odds with your union,
or your union is at odds with you,
you're not going to get anything done.
You might as well forget about it.
So you have to create a healthy environment
to where you are able to communicate
with your union leadership.
Union and management in the fire service needs to be like this.
We cannot be like this.
We all need to aspire to be like this.
When we aspire for this, we achieve greatness.
We achieve success on every single level,
because none of us can do this alone.
We must do it together.
So I just wanted to add that, and I
wanted to applaud the gentleman up here,
because it takes that communication
in working with labor in order to make these things success.
Well, let's expand on that.
I want to get to another topic, but while we're already
talking about that, the progressive people
that I've interacted with have made it work.
I've said, you know what?
I'm tired of going to funerals.
My people are exhausted.
I'm seeing divorces.
I'm seeing all kinds of stuff.
This needs to change.
I'm also seeing a lot of people, and I'm
blaming my rank firefighter all the way through to the top.
That'll never happen here.
They'll never go for it, which is so dismissive and cowardly,
in my opinion.
So let's unpack leadership for a second.
Talk to me about how you forge the relationships
in the community, and then talk to me about courage,
because ultimately, this is something
that's going to be unpopular for individuals,
whether they're in a union, whether they're wearing
a chief's bugles.
But this is the conversation that
needs to happen if we really want to save lives
in the fire service.
So I'll kick it back to you, Hugh, and then we'll go down.
And Joel, I'd love to get your thoughts, too.
Yeah, I mean, it's an extremely valid point.
You see, I have a distinct advantage,
and a lot of fire chiefs that have worked and retired
and went somewhere else tend to have this similar advantage.
I don't do what I do for money.
I came back to the fire service to change
the face of mental health within the fire service,
because of all the years I had spent actually in practice
doing neurofeedback and doing some other things that I knew
would be a game changer.
So I wanted to bring my many years of fire service
leadership experience back.
And so this 2472 all kind of came into play for me.
But it takes an extreme and enormous amount of energy
as the director or fire chief of an organization
just to run your department on a day-to-day basis,
let alone having to step outside the box
and take steps that are going to put you out,
put a noose on you.
That's basically what a lot of us are doing,
especially if we're going into these extremely charged
environments to where you may have political leaders,
because the elected officials are completely
trying to dismantle what they've built in that department,
because they don't think that seven firefighters on a car
accident, well, that's too many people.
You're wasting resources.
14 firefighters on a house fire when the NFPA recommends 21.
And they're telling us, that's too many people.
You need to downsize.
You don't have enough.
They want to take the third person off rescue
and put them on the suppression.
There's some wacky things that are going on out there.
So the bottom line is you have to be
able to create these relationships.
You have to step out of your comfort zone.
And you have to do so by waking up in the morning
and looking at yourself in the mirror and reminding yourself,
why are you wearing a fifth bugle?
Why are you there?
What is it that you're trying to achieve?
Are you there just for your pension?
Are you there to make your department the best it can be?
Are you there just for the membership?
What are you there for?
Self-evaluate, just like we ask our membership out there
when you have a lieutenant that's not acting right,
or a BC that's not acting right.
Look at yourself in the mirror and determine,
why am I serving every day?
What am I here for?
So the self-evaluation and understanding
that this is not easy.
It's not easy to stand up at the dais
and try to tell elected officials who really
don't care about you or what you're doing
that this is the best thing or it's in the best interest.
So again, I, in my particular municipality,
went back to the strategic planning model.
And it just so happened my city was
having some senior leadership issues
and asked me to step in at a little bit of a higher
rank than I am to facilitate that strategic planning
for the city.
So they basically handed me a little bone there.
So through that ability to strategic plan,
we were able to educate the public on what
was necessary monetarily to the point where
I was successful at increasing our fire assessment fee in order
to cover all of the items that I need,
whether it's the 2472, whether it's the fact we just
bought a fire boat, we'll be the second department
in Palm Beach County north of Boca with a fire boat.
We have a lot of wire water that we need to cover.
Whatever the case may be, whatever
you have within your jurisdiction
that you need to obtain funding for,
you can't do it unless you have these communications
with your elected officials and senior leadership.
So it's our job, me wearing that fifth bugle.
It's my job to educate not only my senior leadership,
but those elected officials, and do it
through strategic planning, and you will be successful.
So if I go back to the two problems
that we were trying to solve, number one was safety.
Number two was retention.
That's really how we approached that.
We approached it in lockstep with our union.
But when we talked to the commission,
we actually referred to it as the safety staffing model.
And one of the big selling points that we showed
was how often people were working,
and the question of whether or not that was safe,
and the answer was no.
And then as often as possible, we
invite our elected officials to come in and do ride-alongs
with the fire department.
And 100% of the time, whenever they come in and do a ride,
they're bought in on the job.
So that was the important things.
And our commissioners did do that.
They were understanding that firefighters
didn't want to work that many hours.
They weren't trying to pad their paycheck.
They wanted to go home at the end of their shift,
and we weren't letting them.
We were mandatorying them in.
And they were carrying that burden.
Their family was carrying that burden.
But there was a safety factor to that.
So that's how we approached it.
We literally called it the safety factor staffing model.
And I just heard our human resources manager
refer to that Thursday, whenever we ratified the contract.
And so that kind of stuck a little bit.
And that's how we got that in the minds of the commissioners.
And we approached that step by step with the union.
It was definitely a collaboration.
As a local leader, we're able to have conversations
with our commissioners that everybody in this room
cannot have.
We're able to talk to them a different way
than you're able to talk to them.
The public push was all public safety.
So we were a perfect storm.
We were averaging 12-minute response times.
We had some that were over 30% of our calls were 15 minutes.
So we had a huge public safety issue.
So when we were going in our BOCC chambers
and we were preaching to them about what we need,
there wasn't one time where we talked about wages, hours
worked, nothing that benefited us.
It was all to benefit the public,
knowing that if they increase the millage rate,
everything else is going to fall in line.
We're also blessed to have a staff in my agency that
works well with us.
We have a great relationship.
And they're preaching on their side,
and we're doing the same.
We're the same numbers, the same information,
talking to the same people.
And eventually, we got over the finish line.
Now, this year, we just had an increase in our millage rate
for the first time in seven years.
So it was a big deal.
Yeah, that's what I'm.
I just want to come from the firefighter perspective.
I'm not a union president, not a chief.
But one of the things that I've seen our rank,
with the opposition, again, they'll never go for it,
is I believed all the way until just a few years ago
that I worked one day on, two days off.
And finally, the penny dropped.
I was like, wait a second.
An eight hour day is a day in the civilian world
with a one hour lunch.
So I worked three days on.
That second day from midnight to 8 AM, I worked.
So that's not a day off.
So I actually worked three days on, one day off.
So it's not 10 days a month.
It's 30 days a month.
And so then I asked the question, well, then
why is the person who wakes up from a dead sleep,
slides down a pole, gets in the back of a tiller,
goes to a house fire, throws a ladder,
does a primary search, pulls out a kid,
and rescues not here, DOS his gear,
now does a pediatric algorithm on this child,
we're OK with them working 56 hours or 80 hours
if you have a mandatory overtime.
But the person who makes my coffee works 40.
This is something that we, as a profession,
need to ask ourselves.
Why do I not deserve to go home?
Why do my family not deserve me to walk through that door
at 8, 30, or 9, or 1 if we change the schedule?
Why do I not deserve that?
And we need to ask ourselves that.
What we do is incredible, absolutely incredible.
And even the Special Forces people that I've interviewed
say, when I'm in Afghanistan, you're protecting my kids.
And they hold us to this standard too.
So it's up to us as well to fight for this.
We're courageous in fires and extrications and rope rescues.
But we're not very courageous in advocating
for time with our families.
So that's kind of a firefighter perspective to me,
is I'd never thought about that until a few years ago.
But why not?
Because we're such a selfless profession
that we just show up.
There are people that do it for free around the country.
But we have to advocate for our own health
so we don't drop dead within five years, which
is what we hear all the time.
And we need to be there for those kids.
Be there for your spouse so your marriage stays intact
and your child is raised healthily.
So to me, the ultimate currency is time, time with our family.
And we've chased dollars and cents for years and years
and years.
I want to kind of go to the recruitment crisis.
So again, devil's advocate.
We can't even hire people now.
How am I supposed to hire another shift?
My personal perspective with all these interviews
that I've done, I hear the great leaders
say this young generation are incredible.
But they value their relationships.
They value their physical health, their mental health.
The way I see the crisis is when I
was hired 20 years ago, back draft had just come out.
9-11 was two years ago.
And we were all gung ho, sooty face, and cats in trees.
Now when I Google what's it like to be a firefighter,
I also see the divorces, the suicides, the addictions,
the obesity, the testosterone destruction, et cetera, et
cetera, et cetera.
The 56 hour week, the 80 hour with mandatory.
And so these young, intelligent recruits, in my opinion,
are looking at this on pieces of paper.
And I had one of the other Gainesville chiefs on my show.
He said he had a young recruit with six different departments
and their stats so he could decide which one to go to.
They're looking at this and going, this isn't for me.
20 years ago, I was up against 1,000 recruits
in Anaheim, California for 30 spots.
So we were there, and we can get there again.
But we're not there right now, and we're spiraling downwards.
So that's my little pre-monologue.
I apologize for that.
But I'll start with you, Joel, even from the researcher's
point of view.
What is your perspective of why it's
harder to hire firefighters now in the time that you've seen?
So over the summer, we had a stakeholder workshop
related to the second edition of that report that I mentioned.
And so that has stakeholders from IFC, IFF, National
Volunteer Fire Council, and then NFFF.
And on that, we talked about some generational differences,
specifically age.
And the younger firefighters were wanting more time home.
And that sort of implied a non-24-hour scheduling system.
And I know we probably may or may not get into that,
but that's a whole other can of worms of looking at, OK,
are we going to be home every day or every 24 or 48 hours?
Even with the 24-72, that, well, I'll take a step back.
First, to understand the problem,
because if we understand and know the problem,
that's going to help dictate what solution we take.
So if it is an issue of safety, OK, 24 hours and then
a longer recovery period is going to be fine.
If it is an issue of wanting to be home,
that's a little bit of a different solution.
And so if you start with the 24-72,
what's stopping someone from going to A48 on and then
six days off?
So because the 24-72 is a four-platoon system,
it can duplicate any of the three platoon system schedules.
So the 24-48, 48-96, and then the Kelly,
you just add an extra rotation for that next crew.
So we're kind of at the beginning of a new system.
And so there are other ways that we can,
if it's from a safety, are we talking about maybe
community-based EMS to reduce the workload,
or is it a conversation of more units or more stations
within a city to help disperse the workload
among the existing personnel?
Two or three very different solutions to two and three
different problems.
That's why I think understanding the problem, such as
recruitment, for example, is key as a starting point
to be able to develop and deliver programs that
can fix that problem.
I know it's not an answer to your question.
No, but it's a strange dynamic from your research point of view.
So yeah, it's good to hear.
The rest of you gentlemen, what do you see as far as the root
of the recruitment crisis?
And have you seen offering these young people this new shift
schedule improve the desire to actually work for your agencies?
So yeah, so I'll start.
So it's interesting that, so at the Palm Beach County Fire
Chiefs Association, we meet on a lot of these topics
all the time, as I'm sure all of you do within your areas.
And about six months ago, and we work very closely
with Palm Beach State College, both EMS and the Fire Academy,
as most of us should be doing, working closely
with our training agencies.
But the data that actually studies
that they've been doing at the college level,
and this is extremely troubling and interesting,
because the number that the college told us,
they did a whole presentation about the statistical data.
And the number is stunning.
58% reduction throughout the United States
in the numbers of individuals who are moving
into public service careers.
So it's not just the fire department.
It's the police department.
It's public works.
If I want to go work in finance at my city,
or I want to go in utilities and be a garbage person,
whatever the case may be, 58% reduction.
So with a 58% reduction of people
going into the fire service or into public service,
on top of you have a situation where, and again,
I hate to be Debbie Downer, but part of why we're all here
doing this is because more firefighters die
by their own hand in the line of duty.
How are we going to stop this epidemic?
The only way we stop it is by looking
at every aspect of what we do and trying to improve it.
To me, the ancillary benefit of what we're doing is retention.
Retention comes from having a good mental health program.
Retention comes from having a good shift schedule
and having good salaries and having good benefits
for your members.
So that's, I think, stunning to look at that reduction
in the number of people going into public service.
I'll start a bigger picture.
I'm going to preach to the choir here for a second.
So number one, the world's just a smaller place.
People don't mind moving as much as they used to.
You can move completely across the country,
and you can still FaceTime with your parents.
Your mom can tell you what to put in the recipe
that you're trying to make so that you're not homesick.
And I think that dynamic really changed a lot for everybody,
including the fire service, where people aren't afraid
to move and to switch jobs and to try new stuff
because it's out there for them.
The other thing is, if you looked
at the start of my career, we had
to worry about comparable departments
or that unicorn department that had a 4% multiplier
or something like that.
And that's where you were worried
about your firefighters going.
But our workforce is pretty versatile.
Number one, they're used to showing up on time.
That beats a lot of the workforce to begin with.
Number two, they're mentally hearty.
They can deal with a lot of stuff.
And number three, they're trained to do a lot of things.
And I mean, I actually have lost a percentage of firefighters
to emergency management in the corporate world.
I have to worry about my firefighters
going to make twice as much as I make working
in emergency management.
You add nursing on top of that.
The number of nurses that we have in the department
has increased exponentially.
And maybe one or two departments,
but the majority of us don't pay them
for that extra medical certification.
They make more money in their part-time job.
And eventually, a lot of them decide, you know what?
I'm going to go do that because I make so much more.
So the options that they have, I think, has increased.
And that's kind of changed the dynamic for us.
The world has simply gotten a little bit smaller.
And then the last thing that I'll say,
and it goes to the mental health of the firefighters,
when I teach EVOC and I try to explain
the importance of that driver operator,
one of the things that I always talk about
is what happens if you're in an accident.
And if you are in an accident and you've ever actually
come face to face with your mortality,
you ask yourself what it is that you really want out of life
and what is important.
And a lot of times, people think to themselves,
you know what is important is spending time with my family.
And where else can I make, for our one to five year range
people, where else can I make $20 an hour
and maybe not put myself at such risk?
And the answer is everywhere.
And that's what we're competing against.
I think the main question every leader of every fire
organization should ask is, are you investing in your people?
Your biggest salesmen for your agency
are the people that work for you, right?
They're teaching the fire academies.
They have a brother, a sister, an uncle
who's in the fire service.
And they're talking to all these new recruits.
What are they saying about the place that they work?
It's not just dollars.
What's your time work during a six hour work week?
Are you looking to go to a three week or a 24 72 schedule?
Do you have a decon program?
How does your agency handle mental health?
All these new hires, they are the most educated
you've ever seen.
If you don't think that your applicants are reviewing
every single agencies, CBA, you're wrong.
This last class, perfect example,
I had somebody coming from another agency.
Before he received the job offer,
reached out to me and talked to me on the phone
for about 45 minutes, going over our contract,
getting the answers to his questions.
They're all doing it.
The one applicant that had six agencies all listed out,
that's not a surprise.
They're coming with college degrees, bachelor's, master's.
They are doing their research before they
pick their 30 year home.
So if we're not investing in our people
that we currently have, how can you expect new ones
to come in the door?
And that was the problem that we were seeing in our agency.
No decon, no mental health, 56 hour work week.
On top of the pay being 25% lower than other agencies
surrounding us, it just was a recipe for disaster.
So how do we fix those issues?
It's going to take time and it's going to take money.
How can we do this in a progressive way
that we can just build on our foundation
and continue to get people in?
And so far it's working for us.
And I told you the numbers of that.
259 applicants, 76 of them are paramedics.
They're the gold standard.
You hire a paramedic, it's no education leave,
it's no tuition reimbursement.
Those are the ones that everybody is going after.
We were receiving zero two years ago.
Huge difference.
That's the answer.
I just want to tag on to the health side.
In my whole career in the fire service and beyond,
when it came to cancer, there were some great, great people
out there.
Obviously, University of Miami is doing amazing things.
I never heard shift work and sleep mentioned.
It was decon, it was plime events, it was extractors.
But sleep deprivation, shift work, and this is ironic,
because shift work is someone who only works a 40 hour work
week, is a class two or class B carcinogen
by the World Health Organization.
When it comes to mental health, there
is a direct correlation between sleep deprivation and addiction
and depression and anxiety and suicide.
Yet we're not talking about that either.
It's the elephant in the room.
So when you're looking at the health side,
we've been talking about how to make it work
in recruitment and financial.
But if you're looking at the health of your first responder,
weight gain, testosterone.
If anyone here knows a firefighter who
hasn't got a testosterone of 300 or less,
it's been on for 10 years, then you're an anomaly.
That's not because everyone's just suddenly,
their testes have just given up.
It's because sleep deprivation destroys hormonal regularity.
You process trauma when you sleep.
Your brain literally takes a bath.
You process the digestive side.
So your ghrelin and your leptin is all out of whack.
Your insulin is out of whack.
And we wonder why we have weight gain in the fire service.
It's not if, it's when, unless you are so kind of tuned in
that you're able to circumnavigate that.
So when it comes to the health side, again, why
are we working for 42 hours?
And I'd like to kind of say this.
People ask me for the data.
I wish I could give you data, but we haven't done it.
As Joel pointed to, there's almost no research
whatsoever on shift work in the fire service.
But I can show you the data on how not to do it.
It's how we've done it for the last 80 years.
And look at the results.
We're in here, most of us, because we're losing firefighters
and we actually care.
So if the way we do it now doesn't work,
then the equal and opposite is only going to improve it.
And the shift and the work week and some of the other things
that we've talked about are massive false multipliers
in cancer, in mental health, in all these other areas.
So I just want to kind of put that in there.
I want to get to the success.
But before we do, let's talk teething troubles.
I mean, you guys are pioneers in the country, really.
So what are some of the stumbling blocks?
I've heard about promotion, especially in the young
department, for example.
I don't know, again, Joel, I want to kind of include you.
If there's anything that you've seen as far as challenges
to having these conversations and any barriers, even
from the research point of view.
No, there was a department in Texas that the membership
wanted 4096.
Chief wanted a later start time based on what we kind of
covered with it.
And so he was able to work with membership
to get both of those put into place.
So it was a working relationship.
What you had mentioned, it's a collaboration
to get something good out of it.
Not everybody likes to be told what to do,
but maybe there could be a give and take situation
to have a better outcome.
So Hugh, again, stumbling blocks.
I mean, we want to obviously have this budget,
hire other people, and off we go.
But talk to me about that transition process.
I think a lot of that would be what everyone in this room
is thinking about.
And it's funny, because it's the things that you miss.
I completely missed the fourth locker in the stations.
I just missed that.
It's a minor thing, but wow, I just missed it.
So we didn't budget for it.
I got to find some money for it.
So we did.
But you've got to think of every little aspect of this
from the training.
And of course, the promotions were the same.
We promoted 14 people.
We promoted.
And we have lieutenants on every rescue truck.
And we actually just are now going to captains
on suppressions.
So it's all of these things.
It's promotions.
It's training.
It's making sure that the individual is comfortable
doing that.
Luckily, even on our small department,
we had enough individuals that were qualified
to fill these positions, which again, is something we looked
at before we even did it.
We looked at what are the ramifications going
to be across the board.
And so we had a lot of young lieutenants out there.
And so we have to beef up.
My training chief's back there shaking his head.
Because you really do.
You have to have a robust training program
that you can get those lieutenants and those captains
up to speed so that they can go out there and represent
your department properly.
So it's back to train, train, train, train.
But I'm going to tell you, it's been a tremendous success
for us.
Dollar-wise, like I said, we're fine.
We're fine.
It didn't hurt us.
It didn't really help us now three years in.
But retention is just off the chain.
We haven't lost one firefighter to retention in three years.
And we're fully staffed.
And we're 100% paramedic department, as these guys said.
The paramedic is the gold standard.
If you can have 100%, you're going
to be doing really, really well.
So honestly, for us, it's just been a win-win.
Funny little side note, the finance
didn't plan for 17 people going in the drop
in the last couple months.
And I'm sending them emails that I'm, listen, you guys got
17 people going in the drop.
You better get ready, because it was coming towards the end
of my budget year.
So of course, 17 people going in the drop, paying back leave,
added about $1.7 million to my budget at the end of the year.
Finance director calls me and says, chief,
is that because of the 2472?
I go, no, bro.
Look at your emails.
I sent you an email that's because of the guys going
in the drop.
But the funny thing is, the first thing
that all the pundits and the pencil pushers want to do
is go back to, oh, it's because you went to the 2472.
But if you don't know your stuff, I know my stuff.
I know my budget.
As the chief, even though I have people helping me,
I know every single dollar that comes in and out
of that fire department.
And that dollar gives me that strength
to be able to manage it appropriately.
So good for us.
Yeah, it's the administrative things
that kind of sneak up on you.
Our payroll system had a seizure,
because I couldn't figure it out.
So part of the negotiation process,
we negotiated 10 hours straight, which essentially kept us
at 52 hours before overtime kicked in.
And the firefighters figured that out pretty quickly,
that the straight time can still count towards my retirement.
So they were all about it.
And the city was happy about it, because they were like,
we got them.
They're going to work 10 hours of straight time
before this kicks in.
But our payroll system didn't have a way to do that.
So that was just something that had
to be overcome whenever, eventually, payroll was like,
what do you mean you negotiated this?
So that was one of the big things.
Promotions were very hard.
We had to make a decision as to whether or not.
We wanted to go to the outside for promoted positions
within the department.
After a lot of soul searching, we decided to stay internal.
It required that we carry a couple of lieutenant's
positions for a while.
We'll actually have a lieutenant's test in June.
And that'll make us whole for lieutenants.
And then immediately, I'll be short a couple of drivers
for a couple of months.
And that's because we also chose not
to change something that firefighters love,
which is the standard.
So we could have said, we'll adjust this number of years
that you have to have for this.
As long as you have all the classes,
we could have done that.
But we chose no.
We've held this standard for, theoretically,
since 1882 for GFR.
So we're going to maintain that standard.
We'll carry this for a little while.
And we're going to stay internal because we
wanted to invest in the people that were already there.
So that's why we chose to do that.
But that was a huge lift.
Obviously, we haven't started our 2472s yet.
But we're trying to get in front of the issues
that Boyden and Gainesville had.
We're going to exhaust our promotional list in January
for the cabins and drivers and get them riding in those seats
a year prior.
At least they have a year of experience under their belt.
What they're going to do in the meantime
is they're going to offset all the Kelly Day people that
are off and also PTO and PTOU vacancies.
If we have any extras and driver and captain,
they're going to go to a station that
has a tanker and brush truck.
And your most senior driver and captain
is going to man the tanker or brush
while the other one is getting actual seat time.
The fourth locker, big deal.
That was one of the biggest discussions.
And we were negotiating from our members.
Of course, what are we going to do?
We don't have four refrigerators.
That gear sheds.
That's another one, too.
Where are you going to store your gear?
Are we going to put it in the bays where our diesel exhaust is
blowing all over again?
OK, well now we're taking two steps back.
So just trying to figure out all those issues
before we get there.
Obviously, we know there's going to be speed bumps.
But I think, once again, it comes back
to having a collaborative relationship between labor
and management and figuring out what those issues are,
trying to be in Osier-Dames and seeing before they get here,
and find a way that works for both of us to figure it out
and overcome them.
Brilliant.
Well, I want to open the floor to questions in a second.
I've got one more question for you guys.
I'm going to skip you this time, Joel.
Success.
What are you seeing?
Comradery.
I mean, all the things.
Some of the things are tangible.
Obviously, you mentioned overtime reductions and things.
But even it's funny, even in the sleep world,
the metric is still sleepiness.
There is no actual measurable slide roll for sleep
deprivation.
But happiness, time with families, et cetera.
What are you seeing now as far as that in your workforce?
So it's interesting, because before we started,
we had very little member participation
in any benevolent, any off-duty events, any of these things.
We had very, very poor participation.
Plus, right around the same time,
we completely went to a new behavioral health program,
which was a game changer for us.
It's the primer within the fire service.
And I would, any of you that want information on it,
reach out.
But it was seeing the participation of our members.
And then when they were participating,
they're much happier.
You walk around in the stations, and everyone's on Cloud 9.
Everybody's proud to work for our fire department.
When you go to other stations, you go to other departments,
we go to these events, everyone is starting to say, wow,
wow, the name of Boynton is becoming,
they're proud, because they see all the work that we're
doing within the department.
And so they're proud to be there,
because they see labor and management,
as we keep harping on, is working together so well
that morale is at an all-time high.
Yeah, I'll echo that.
This was something that both labor and management
worked on together.
And labor and management doesn't agree on everything.
But the fact that this is something that both worked on
and achieved, I think, meant a lot to the firefighters.
And so they viewed that, since there
wasn't an opposing side of this from labor and management,
they were really appreciative of that benefit
that the city commission chose to be able to give them.
So morale increased.
I started instantly hearing about this concept
called the ghost shift, which is a shift that the other shift
never touches.
Previously, it was always a shift.
Or whoever that shift that you relieved,
it was always their fault. Now everybody
blames the ghost shift as the one that completely causes
all the problems in the department.
But the change was palpable.
Before we actually pulled the trigger,
I went into the stations as much as possible, talked to everybody.
And then for the actual first four days,
I showed back up to see people.
And whenever I would see them come back on on that fourth day,
it was like a pressure relief valve had just went off.
And it was an instantaneous change
that I saw from that extra recovery time.
And a couple of months later, that's still there.
I think I mentioned it.
I have one unit that runs 6,000 calls a year.
And on the 2448, it just wasn't sustainable.
We had a peak time unit that we brought in
to be able to assist them.
And half of the calls were after midnight.
And after we moved to the 2472, I went back in
and was like, I'm going to get you know,
we lost the peak time unit for funding issues.
And I'm like, I'm going to work on this.
I'm going to get it back.
And they were like, it would be nice.
But it was sustainable for them now.
So that was a big change.
That was the win.
I think so far for us, it's a success.
The morale in our agency is night and day
from where we were two years ago.
The recruitment and retention is also night and day
from where we were two years ago.
The house that I work out of, we're busy.
Last year, the engine ran 20.
Both rescues ran 23 apiece.
So the guys at my station, every day, it's, I can't wait.
I can't wait till January 26 when we have that 2472,
that extra day off.
So now we just have to maintain and continue to get
to the point where we can keep this program going
and make it be successful.
But right now, it's proven to be a success for our agency.
Beautiful.
Well, just to round up, and then I
want to open it to questions.
For the people that say it will never happen,
they'll never go for it, we have Gainesville, Boynton Beach,
Pascoe, Destin, Miramar, Palm Beach Gardens, Palm Beach
County.
So you have large and small.
You have county, you have city.
So what's beautiful is they'll never go for it.
Well, they did.
And they made it happen.
And I think what's exciting for me
is you can turn tragedy into triumph
because this recruitment crisis has forced
us to have this conversation.
And now it's kind of a race.
I live in Marion County.
We have the Florida State Fire College where I live.
The county that protects my family at the moment
hasn't entertained this conversation yet.
So every young, bright firefighter
that would be responding to my family in their worst day
is going to Gainesville instead.
So this is obviously going to force this whole conversation
because, as I said to people, if you really want to be blunt,
you can either be at the helm of the ship
when you turned it around and be the hero,
or you can be at the helm when it sinks.
So I hope the courage of these departments
kind of inspires you to make that courageous decision
yourself.
Here we are.