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Next fire commish will face plenty of heat

Mayor Kenney is still looking outside Philadelphia for a new fire commissioner.

Firefighters pour water on a four-alarm apartment building fire in the 2100 block of Locust Street on Jan. 19, 2016.
Firefighters pour water on a four-alarm apartment building fire in the 2100 block of Locust Street on Jan. 19, 2016.Read moreTOM GRALISH / Staff Photographer

WHEN IT came time to build his administration last fall, Mayor Kenney didn't hesitate to turn to some familiar faces.

Richard Ross was appointed the city's police commissioner. Mike DeBerardinis was tapped to be managing director. Debbie Mahler, Kenney's longtime aide in City Council, was named deputy mayor for intergovernmental affairs.

But Kenney, the son of a retired Philadelphia fire battalion chief, committed himself early on to conducting a national search for a fire commissioner.

With his first month in the mayor's office nearly over, the search for a new commissioner is ... apparently still going on.

Whoever ends up landing the top job will have to tackle a variety of complicated, controversial issues, the kinds of problems that require cases of Excedrin Extra Strength.

Last winter, the Fire Department was embroiled in a headline-grabbing sex scandal that prompted the Inspector General's Office to launch an investigation.

The office called for seven members of the department to face discipline for having sexually harassed or engaged in a sexual relationship with a mentally troubled female paramedic.

Following the scandal, the Daily News found that sexual-harassment complaints were not uncommon in the department, which counts just 150 women among its 2,100 members.

Racial tensions are still an issue, simmering below the surface. And we have not even gotten to lingering concerns over emergency-response times and ambulance shortages.

"We decided to conduct a national search for the fire commissioner, along with three other commissioner appointments. That doesn't just mean we're looking for 'outsiders,' " Kenney's spokeswoman, Lauren Hitt, wrote in an email.

"In all of those positions, we're trying to find someone who could transition in quickly and who is familiar with the type of challenges and opportunities the departments are facing, but also someone who has the experience to be able to weigh our best practices against best practices in other cities.

"When it comes to the fire commissioner - specifically, the mayor's father was a firefighter - so, above all else, he's looking for someone who can honor the sacrifices our firefighters make every time they put on the uniform."

The biggest issue for the next commissioner might simply be operational.

In 2013, the Daily News reported that 84 percent of the 276,939 calls to which the Fire Department responded were medical emergencies, not fires, yet the city employed just 248 paramedics at the time.

The city pledged to spend $8.4 million in 2014 to hire 80 EMTs and replace 25 ambulances, but there is no escaping the fact that the nature of the business has changed.

Officials of International Association of Fire Fighters Local 22 have said that the city routinely runs out of ambulances and that residents have had to wait as long as 45 minutes.

Fire Department brass, meanwhile, have insisted that the situation is not nearly that dire, pegging the average response time at 8 minutes and 15 seconds.

Philadelphia isn't the only city struggling with this problem. In a July 2015 article on Governing.com - not-so-subtly titled "Why We Need to Take the 'Fire' Out of 'Fire Department' " - Phil Keisling wrote that fire departments across the country must rethink their approach.

Keisling, who directs the Center for Public Service at Portland State University's Mark O. Hatfield School of Government, cited stats showing that fire departments nationwide responded to 31.6 million emergency calls in 2013, 1.24 million of which were for fires.

The number of emergency calls had nearly tripled since 1980. The number of calls for actual fires had been cut almost in half.

Kenney's administration thinks highly of Derrick Sawyer, who was appointed fire commissioner by Mayor Nutter in June 2014.

But there's obvious appeal in hiring an outsider, who can start fresh without being burdened by existing relationships or internal griping about veering away from the way things always have been done here.

City Controller Alan Butkovitz has long criticized the Fire Department's "Third World response rate" and organizational shortcomings.

He pointed to Nutter's decision to hire Charles H. Ramsey to run the Philadelphia Police Department as an example of the type of commissioner Kenney needs.

"The Fire Department has had a series of career bureaucrats who moved into the top spot," Butkovitz said.

"Some of them didn't have a particularly strong background in fighting fires or doing paramedic runs. They were more bureaucrats than frontline people, so they didn't have the kind of national reputation and clout that Ramsey brought to the police department."

(Although Nutter got along swimmingly with Ramsey, his administration was perpetually at odds with Local 22, leaving the Fire Department caught in the middle.)

Local 22 president Andrew Thomas says he hopes that Kenney will still consider in-house candidates for the top job, given their familiarity with the department's strengths and weaknesses.

But either way, the department likely will be in for some noticeable changes.

"I think any new fire commissioner will ... look to the future, and then plan for it," Thomas said. "The organizational chart may change."

gambacd@phillynews.com

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On Twitter: @dgambacorta