The New York State Fire Service Council
DATE: TUESDAY, JANUARY 14TH, 2020
TIME 10:00 A.M.
LOCATION Town of Colonie Fire Training Facility, upper classroom
As a valuable contributor you are being invited to the next Fire Service Council meeting. If you have dates and locations of upcoming events it would be very helpful to the Secretary if you submitted them in writing on the day of the meeting, it’s very difficult to capture the accurate information you wish to convey during the meeting.
If you have an idea for a guest speaker or a particular topic that needs to be focused upon please submit a request in writing so that it can be scheduled and the proper amount of time can be allocated during the meeting. Our goal is cooperation, coordination and communication.
Our Additional Responsibility for 2020 will be the following:
As a function of the discussions related to “Creating an Evolving Fire Service Staffing Model”, we will be discussing several topics and forming sub-committees as an expanded role of the Fire Service Council. This initiative was born out of several years of discussion related to the challenges being encountered by the volunteer and career fire service models in our State. The earliest analysis of this problem began in 1987 with a white paper entitled The Future of the Fire Service in New York State under the auspices of Frank Stefanelli, Jim King and O. Jerry Clark. Most recently a series of meetings was held with the fire service organizations and OFPC which was called “Moving Forward” and more recently a series of facilitated discussions lead by Chief Marc Bashoor and Chief John Buckman which took us beyond recruitment and retention. One thing we all agree on is that we have a challenge, called adequate staffing, and we must take steps to provide guidance to fire departments across the state to address the problem. At the most recent meeting of the organization’s representatives it was suggested that since almost all the representatives in the room also attended the Fire Council and I was named group facilitator it would be a wise use of time to continue the discussion in coordination with the Council meetings which also included other key members such as OFPC and divine guidance from members of the Chaplains Association.
Thank you we look forward to seeing you or your representative.
Tom Rinaldi, Chairman