Big Bear Fire Chief Jeff Willis has exited as the fire chief in Big Bear, if not entirely on his own terms, at the end of his contract and not at the dictate of the firefighters union, with which over the last several years be grew crosswise.
Unknown at this time is whether his successor, who has yet to be determined and who will be saddled with the same financial limitations and will be answerable to the same political masters Willis has dealt with for 13 years, will be able to forge any better of a relationship with the firefighters union than Willis did. Bets are now being placed as to whether the replacement fire chief, who will need to come to terms with the same Big Bear Fire Authority Board of Directors beset with its inner tensions that Willis coexisted with, will encounter any less rough sledding than he did.
Willis began working with the Big Bear City Fire Department as a very young man in 1984. In January 2008, he became the youngest fire chief in that department’s history. At that time, there were no fewer than five separate fire agencies in the Big Bear community and its environs. In July 2011, the Big Bear City Community Services District Board and the Big Bear City Council acquiesced in having Willis take on the assignment of fire chief with the Big Bear Lake Fire Department, even while he was yet heading the Big Bear City Fire Department. Thereafter, Willis divided his time between Station 281 in Big Bear Lake and Station 282 in Big Bear City, Station 283 in Sugar Loaf and Station 284 in Big Bear City, with occasional sojourns to the paid call stations in Boulder Bay and Moonridge.
In 2012, the Big Bear Lake City Council and the Big Bear City Community Services District Board of Directors committed to the merger of the Big Bear Lake Fire Department and the Big Bear City Fire Department under an arrangement that included the creation of the Big Bear Fire Authority and its governing board.
The Big Bear Fire Authority Board of Directors, to whom Willis answered consists of ten members, those being the five Big Bear City Community Services District board members and all five Big Bear Lake City Council members. The Big Bear Fire Department is responsible for looking after fire safety, the provision of paramedic service and fire suppression in the 6.42 square mile incorporated municipality of Big Bear Lake with its 5,046 inhabitants as well as the unincorporated expansive 32.03-square mile Big Bear City with its 12,738 residents. Despite its name, Big Bear City is an unincorporated county area and is not a municipality.
Willis, as the only fire chief in the 13-year history of the Big Bear Fire Authority, has had to make do with operating the fire department within a 38.45-square mile jurisdiction that includes multiple intensive fire-danger zones on a budget mandated by his ten tightfisted political taskmasters.
It went without dispute that Willis, given his institutional memory of the Big Bear Fire Department and knowledge of the lay of the land in the Big Bear community, understood better than virtually anyone else what challenges faced the fire department and the best way, given the facilities, personnel, equipment, tools and strategies available to him, to meet those challenges.
The rank-and-file members of his department, however, did not have to deal, as Willis did, with the ten sometimes-shifting personalities on the fire authority board. Nor did they have to come to immediate terms with the financial constraints he had to function under as chief. Those firefighters, many of them a generation younger than Willis, had expectations with regard to the day-to-day fire service operations more in keeping with larger municipal departments. There expectations of Willis were shaped by modern concepts of how the planning, organizing, directing and controlling of a fire department is conducted with longterm goals in mind and preparing for the future rather than functioning on a day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month or, at most, sason-to-sean basis. While some of thr expectations of these younger firefighters were reasonable, others, primarily because of financial considerations, were not.
Because of financial limitations, department operations among the authority’s four brick-and-mortar and two metal/paid call stations did not, in all respects, meet the fire industry’s best practices standards. In particular, firefighters found fault with the manner in which between 2012 and 2020, the department did not have have a working budget for apparatus replacement and had not replaced a single major piece of firefighting equipment or vehicle. Moreover, the firefighters decried Willis’s insistence on two-man fire crews, which among firefighting professionals is considered to be an anachronism that is dangerous and inadequate. The agency’s firefighters tried importuning, persuasion, negotiating and demands. When that did not work, they made threats.
Willis was faced with the financial reality that simply paying the firefighters – who on average at the outset of their careers were being paid $57,433 in base pay/salary with an average of $27,737 in overtime for a total of $85,170 before benefits and deferred compensation – was consuming virtually the entire amount allotted him for operational costs. The only way for him to meet his underlings’ demands was to cut their pay, a solution he could not apply.
In the summer of 2023, the Big Bear Professional Firefighters Association gave the ten-member fire authority an ultimatum: either Willis was removed as chief or they would walk out.
As it would turn out, the union did not get what it was demanding. The board recognized that Willis was in the position of being damned for not complying with the association’s demands and that he would be equally or more damned if he did. The board brassed it out and informed the association that the firefighters could do as they chose – stay on the job or strike – but that either way Willis would remain as fire chief until the close of his contract on June 20, 2025.
Now, at the age of 60, Willis has retired.
Of note is that when Willis made clear his intention some six months back that he intended to comply with the wishes of those he oversees and retire at the end of June, no long lines of those applying to replace him formed. Even those among the rank-and-file who felt that Willis lacked the backbone and strength of character to stand up to the Big Bear Fire Authority Board of Directors to extract the funding needed to fully modernize the department, refurbish its facilities and replace its aging equipment recognize that they themselves cannot move both heaven and earth at will and would be no more capable than Willis has been in that regard and that they, themselves, might be even less likely to be able to adapt to the everyday reality of the department’s fiscal limitations and keep the community as safe as Willis has over the past 13 years.