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Mike Dwyer's avatar

Eric: “WTFD, at its core, is a volunteer department and my plan focuses on recruiting and retaining volunteer firefighters first.”

Eric is wrong. WTFD isn’t and hasn’t been a volunteer fire dept for several years. This is a combination fire dept, we have a volunteer and career firefighters that work together closely.

The career FFs aren’t “supplementing” the volunteers and the volunteers aren’t “supplementing” the careers.

Back when we initially hired our 1st paid FF in 2010 and then our 2nd paid FF in 2015, WTFD as a volunteer dept supplemented by paid staff would have likely been an correct statement.

But by investing in those paid firefighters (and hire more) with benefits like; insurance, retirement, training, better pay, we went from just having “paid firefighters” to having “career firefighters”.

There is a difference and Eric doesn’t seem to understand that difference.

His constant “volunteer FFs supplemented by career FFs” statements are demeaning to the career firefighters we currently have and discouraging to any future potential hires.

EDIT: corrected some grammar. Had to delete initial comment and repost as I couldn’t figure out how to edit my original comment.

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Shari Hertz's avatar

Eric, the department has had a station resident program since the early 1990’s. Resident quarters were built into the expansion of the old station 1 and currently exist in both stations. I can send you a complete list of the many station residents over the years including the current one. This is certainly not a new idea that you seem to be giving yourself credit for.

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