Felipe Hernandez is the chief of the Rochester Fire Department.
The Rochester Fire Department is a dynamic and essential agency, the city’s best ambassador, and its work is often literally a matter of life and death.
The success of the Rochester Fire Department is tied to the success of its chief.
It is, therefore, essential for Felipe Hernandez to be a successful chief.
The question then becomes: How can that happen?
After a desultory confirmation hearing before City Council, the takeaways were that Hernandez doesn’t much like the department, and council doesn’t know much about the fire service.
No discussion of rumored plans to move equipment or shut fire stations. No review of response times. No mention of deep-seated street-level concerns about the city’s ambulance contractor. No update on appropriately staffing the fire boat. No mention of the opioid epidemic, in which the fire department is the frontline life-saving agency. No questions about the department’s plans for fighting high-rise fires as empty downtown office buildings turn into apartment complexes. No inquiry about the department’s understaffing of specialty units – like its recent issue with trench rescue. No curiosity about the frequent mutual aid calls for suburban departments to back up the city.
Neither the chief nor the council sounded like they had ever heard of any of those matters.
Instead, there were questions about the charity fire calendar, recruitment and promotion of LGBTQ people, and helping juvenile arsonists avoid the “pipeline” to prison.
That’s what council was interested in.
What the chief was interested in was changing the “culture” of the department. That was code for a department which, apparently in his estimation, is dominated by white guys who aren’t very nice to brown and black guys. He kept bringing it up, intoning that there was trouble in paradise, insinuating that the fire department was one more bastion of white supremacy and intolerance.
As evidence, he told the painful tale of his own victimization.
When he came on the department, Felipe Hernandez said, he was called Phil because his given name was too hard for those in the “culture” of the fire department to say correctly.
Must be that noted Caucasian difficulty with pronouncing three-syllable words.
Actually, when Hernandez came on the department, and for years afterword, he introduced himself as Phil. And, for the first quarter of his career – and for almost 40 years before – one of the nation’s most popular baseball players and managers was Felipe Alou, who was never called Phil, as near as I can tell.
But that was the new chief’s assertion: White firefighters have a clannish culture that excludes people who look differently.
Not surprisingly, most firefighters think he’s full of crap.
They also think he’s a guy with little administrative experience and less fire-ground experience and that he’s in way over his head. They expect that his administration will be a time of bitterness, with him hiding in his office, promoting his cronies and wrecking the careers of those who cross him.
And that’s no good.
Because our premise is that the fire department is important, and it will serve best with a successful chief.
So how does Felipe Hernandez become a good chief? How does this rift get healed?
By starting over. By letting the new confirmation and the new mayor be the dawn of a new day.
Yesterday is done, and its disagreements and hard feelings need to be done, too.
Chiefs lead, and Hernandez will need to lead in this regard. He will need to leave his office, he will need to actually and frequently go to fire houses. He will actually have to go to fire scenes. He will need to trust people and earn their trust.
And where he has weaknesses, he will need to learn, and delegate until he does. If his career has not given him the opportunity to command on the fire ground, then he should acquire that skill now. Go to every fire. Get in the smoke and the soot and the sweat. And have a capable and trusted battalion chief or captain by his side, to backstop him. There is no shame in that. In fact, it will build respect as the firefighters see their chief actually being one of them.
It will also build the chief’s regard for his firefighters to see them doing their jobs – brothers and sisters, side by side.
I think that the problem is that the chief and his firefighters don’t truly know one another. Both are dealing with assumptions and stereotypes, and their judgments have hardened. But both deserve another chance.
He needs to go to them. Maybe he should take some burgers or steaks. He should open his door and open his mind.
And they should be aware of his sensitivities. He doesn’t feel like he was accepted by his comrades. He thinks that’s because of his heritage. Whether he’s right or wrong, the right thing to do is recognize he feels excluded and go out of the way to include him. And, in case he’s on to something, that same purposeful inclusion should extend to all members of the department of every background.
The fact is that the members of the fire department, from top to bottom, share a sacred duty which must not be derailed by personal spite or race politics. The chief and his firefighters must work together, and they must do so in a fashion that brings out the best in each of them.
So there needs to be a reset. And both sides – with the chief in the fore – must embrace the brotherhood of their service.
Because the fire department isn’t about skin color, it’s about the patch – the patch they all wear and which symbolizes the city they are sworn to protect and serve. That oneness must be defining.
The chief needs to lead in that vein.
And if he does, if he opens his heart and his mind to his firefighters -- and they do the same to him – then he and they will be a success together.
And Felipe Hernandez will be a good fire chief.