AURORA | In just six months, Fernando Gray’s friendly southern drawl has become something of a fixture at Aurora’s fire stations.
When he came on board as Aurora’s new fire chief in June, Gray set about visiting each of the city’s 15 stations.
The thinking, Gray said, was that if he was going to forge the relationships with rank and file firefighters he wanted, it was better for him to go to where they are rather than ask them to come meet him.
“If people feel like they are a part of the change process, typically they are going to be more receptive and say, ‘yes, this is a thing I can do,’” he said this week during an interview in his office at the Aurora Municipal Center.
And in his half a year at the helm, Gray hasn’t been shy about making changes.
He scrapped one of the four deputy chief positions — which was already vacant — and used the savings from that to promote six lieutenants to captain. He also shifted some training resources from new recruits to veteran firefighters, a move he said ensures those experienced crews get additional skills.
Most importantly though, Gray said, he has set about making sure the department’s focus is on what it does most: emergency medical service calls.
Those sorts of calls, be they slip and falls, heart attacks or medical issues, make up 80 percent of what Aurora Fire Rescue does. And while the department already set out under former Chief Mike Garcia to make sure each firefighter was EMS certified, Gray said at the upper ranks of the department, there hasn’t always been enough focus on EMS.
In the department’s top ranks, just five high-level officials were tasked with supporting EMS efforts specifically. The restructured organizational chart has eight officials ranked battalion chief or above focused on EMS.
Gray said the departments medical service units — a plan adopted a few years ago that sees two crew members using smaller trucks designed specifically for medical calls, instead of sending full firefighting crews to medical calls — could also expand. Starting in January the department is launching a pilot program that will test those units on 24-hour shifts to see if the program should be expanded.
Along the way, Gray said he has met little pushback, something that surprised him.
“Change is very difficult for people, not just in the fire service, but anywhere,” he said.
The reviews on Gray from firefighters and city officials have been glowing.
Sean Moran, president of Aurora Firefighters Local No. 1290, the union representing firefighters, said Gray has been good to work with.
The union has a longstanding list of complaints toward city hall — mainly that the department is understaffed and underequipped — that predate Gray. But Moran said he is confident Gray can help turn those things around.
“Chief Gray seems to be up to the task of getting us back on track to growing fire and EMS services in a more productive and responsible manner,” he said in an email.
Councilwoman Francoise Bergan, who chairs council’s Public Safety and Courts Committee, said she has been impressed with how Gray has committed himself to getting to know the department.
“He really tries to understand the culture of the fire department and our community,” she said. “He has taken the time to really analyze what improvements can be made.”
Gray’s commitment to talking to the entire department before launching major changes was key, she said.
Gray, who is Aurora’s first African American fire chief, said he hopes to make the department more diverse.
Fire officials have tried for years to lure more minority firefighters to Aurora, but the department remains overwhelmingly white, with only about 20 percent of the 365 sworn officers identifying as a member of a minority group.
To recruit a more diverse pool of firefighters, Gray said community outreach is key. For firefighters, he said that means more than just responding to calls. Firefighters have to be involved with the community. That could mean reading programs or other non-traditional roles for firefighters, he said, as long as they help build those relationships.
As a child growing up in southeast Dallas’ Pleasant Grove neighborhood, Gray said he remembers firefighters at nearby station No. 34 helping him put air in his bike tire.
That’s a small thing and not exactly what people think of when they think about firefighters, but Gray said it showed him at a young age that those firefighters cared and he could strive to be like them.
“That’s part of the reason that I am in the fire service,” he said.
As for his hometown, where he spent more than two decades with Dallas fire, Gray said he misses his family, particularly his two grown children who are off at college, but he is settling in to his new home.
Being the chief means much of Gray’s time is spent at City Hall, not at a fire house hopping on a fire engine whenever a call comes in. Still, Gray said he doesn’t fret about missing those days when he was on the line. Instead he said he takes pleasure knowing his work on the fourth floor of City Hall means the men and women in the fire houses have the resources they need to get their job done. “That is something that really excites me,” he said. “It’s the reason why I’m very happy in the role that I have.”