Merced Fire Department to hire temporary chief for planning

Merced City Fire has received approval to hire a temporary employee to assess the department’s staffing and needs as the city grows.

The City Council on Tuesday unanimously approved $72,778 in wages for the temporary employee for a maximum of 960 hours, or almost six months of work.

Fire Chief Shawn Henry said the department has been without a deputy chief for more than a year, and has been otherwise short-staffed. So the department needs help in planning, he said.

“This employee will be coming in solely to work on a standards-of-coverage plan for us,” he said.

The city is expected to grow, particularly as UC Merced expands. In recent months, the city also has seen proposals for three large apartment complexes in north Merced and a 70-acre retail center toward the eastern end of town.

The growth could affect the response times for firefighters, Henry said. So the department needs to figure out where to best place its resources.

Brad Grant, the city’s chief financial officer, said the money to be used on the temporary employee should not affect the budget planned for the Fire Department. The wages will be paid from an additional, unexpected savings the city saw while operating without a deputy chief.

Budget constraints have been an issue for the department in recent years. Earlier this year, the council added extra funds to the department in an attempt to end brownouts, a policy in place for about three years that sometimes left the department short-staffed to save overtime dollars. The department also added two firefighters.

Chad Englert, president of the Merced City Firefighters Union Local 1479, said the union supports the plan and does not expect brownouts to come into play again.

Henry said the department expects the temporary employee to be Michael Wilkinson, a retired Oakdale chief who served as interim chief in Merced for part of last year.

After serving as chief in Oakdale from 2000 to 2007, Wilkinson also worked as deputy fire warden for the Stanislaus County Fire Wardens Office and as an emergency services consultant for UC Berkeley, among other posts, according to city records.

Wilkinson also will be charged with developing fire-prevention plans and mentoring firefighters, according to city records.

This story was originally published September 9, 2015 at 6:08 PM with the headline "Merced Fire Department to hire temporary chief for planning."