West Lakes department to get full-time chief

BIG LAKE — The Mat-Su Borough’s emergency service District II may have a change of leadership soon.

The district, which corresponds to the West Lakes Fire Service Area formed by a merger of the Big Lake and Meadow Lakes fire departments in late 2008, currently has an on-call chief. That’s about to change.

“This will upgrade it to a full-time position,” borough emergency services director Dennis Brodigan said of the department’s search for a chief.

Since it’s a new position, the borough has had to advertise it and go through the hiring process, instead of just handing the position to the chief who’s there now, Bill Gamble. Brodigan said he doesn’t know how many applications the borough has received. Resumés will be accepted through Friday.

Brodigan said creating that full-time position is a change he’s been seeking for three years and which the department — the third busiest in the borough for ambulance calls and second busiest for fire and rescue calls — could really use.

“It’s just getting too big to be managing on a part-time basis,” Brodigan said.

In the longer term, he’d like to do the same thing north of the department in what the borough calls District IV. That district includes the Talkeetna, Willow and Caswell fire service areas.

“Last year in the budget year I asked the assembly for both a District II and a District IV chief to get some full-time leadership in there to kind of stabilize the management end of it,” Brodigan said. “I was approved on the District II, but not on the District IV chief position.”

He’s looking at options for District III as well. The picture there is a little more complicated though since the busiest department, the Palmer Fire Department, is a division of the city of Palmer rather than the borough. That’s an arrangement that works well for Palmer, Brodigan said, and which he doesn’t want to change. Looking at just the borough departments, Brodigan said, there isn’t the call volume to support a full-time chief.

In addition to an expanding population base, which brings with it an expansion in the volume of emergency calls, Brodigan said fire departments in the Valley and even nationwide are faced with a growing set of regulations that have to be addressed.

“Homeland Security, after 9/11, it took them about two or three years to really build their infrastructure, but once they did they started passing mandates that really affect all of our responders,” Brodigan said.

There’s also fire training regulations and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, as well as the Insurance Services Organization. ISO in particular is the standard against which fire departments are judged. And the company’s ratings are often used to calculate homeowners’ insurance rates.

“It’s just more and more and more and more and we’re working with an oncall responder system and it’s a careful balance,” Brodigan said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.