Steve Dongworth is coming up on his fifth anniversary as Calgary’s fire chief.
Dongworth said it has been a satisfying and gratifying time at the helm but it has also come with challenges, as Calgary has seen difficult economic times, almost since his first day at the top.
“When I took over as chief in early January of 2015 we were already starting to see the impact on the energy industry, which of course, had a huge impact on Calgary,” he said.
“In the last year, of course, the big challenge has been, we have obviously seen some significant budget reductions: $9 million in July and we’ve just had another $3.5 million reduction in November.”
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Finding ways to balance the financial strain on the local economy with the expectations of Calgarians for top-notch fire services will be the challenge heading into 2020.
Dongworth said the fire service is managing not only response time expectations and budget reductions but also provincial legislation, Bill 30, introduced in June 2018, for more stringent requirements on employers for having staff trained and competent.
“We have well-trained people but just the frequency of that training and perhaps some areas that we haven’t trained that we need to train in,” the chief said.
“We’re really seeing ourselves faced with a pretty significant challenge in the years ahead, and I told council in November what we may have to do — that I never thought I’d be saying as the fire chief — is actually browning out fire stations during the day into the evening to allow our people to go and do training into the night.
“What browning out means is you may have a fire station in your community but there may be no one in it, no truck in it.”
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Another focus for the year ahead, for Dongworth — who moved to Calgary in 1991 from England — is to continue to improve diversity in the fire service.
“We don’t actually have enough of any of the less well-represented groups; whether it’s women, whether it’s people from different cultures, aboriginal, first nations, whether it’s people with different lifestyles, those who identify from the perspective of gender differently, those kinds of things,” Dongworth said.
“We know we’re well under-represented so we’ve been doing work in all of those areas and we are starting to see more but I think in reality we’re still predominantly not there. We’re doing better as we get the opportunity to hire more. It’s been a target for us, for sure, so we’re hopeful we’ll get there but it’s going to take continued effort.”
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With important targets and challenges on the horizon in 2020, Calgary’s fire chief believes Calgarians can be extremely proud of their fire department.
“I am incredibly humbled, proud and honoured to lead this organization because of the people. The people in this organization are incredible. I end up telling them, we’ve got less money, we’ve got less trucks and they continue to do everything they can to compensate for that in some ways but always to do their best for the community,” Dongworth said.
“I think Calgarians should be reassured they have a very capable fire department despite the fact that we are very challenged right now and we’re going to be challenged into the future. Any one of those people in this uniform will do whatever they need to help you.”
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