By Judy L. Thomas
The Kansas City Star
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — When Kansas City’s new fire chief takes the reins on Monday, he’ll have his work cut out for him.
Craig Buckley is inheriting a department in turmoil, still grieving over the stabbing death of a firefighter in the back of an ambulance last year; criminal cases against some within the ranks; and a string of lawsuits by employees alleging discrimination, retaliation and harassment.
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Not to mention that city leaders had received strong pushback from the community because there were no internal candidates, women or minorities among the finalists for the fire chief position. The other two finalists were from Houston and Washington, D.C.
City manager Mario Vasquez announced Buckley’s hiring on Friday. The former interim fire chief with the City of Orlando is replacing Fire Chief Ross Grundyson, a 30-year KCFD veteran who announced in September that he would retire in January.
Vasquez told members of the Urban Summit of Kansas City about the hiring during their weekly meeting Friday morning. And it wasn’t well received.
“So you know that the last time we were here that the conversation about the fire chief went in the wrong direction,” said Gwen Grant, president and CEO of the Urban League of Greater Kansas City. “We certainly gave a lot of feedback about our concern about this panel of all white males, and strongly suggested that you would throw that panel out and start the search over.”
Bishop James Tindall Sr., president and founder of the Urban Summit Kansas City, didn’t hide his displeasure with the hiring.
“I am irreversibly convinced that there are people on the fire department who are qualified, particularly some African Americans, qualified to be the fire chief,” Tindall told Vasquez. “We may differ at that point in time, but in that you’ve already made that decision, I hope that you will also let this fire chief know that it is his responsibility to communicate with the community.”
Tindall said Grundyson had never spoken before the Urban Summit about members’ concerns in the community.
“But with that said, I just believe that and know that there are people who are qualified to be the fire chief that you presently have,” he said. “It’s unfortunate that the thing has gone the way it has and then we will have to live with what we got and we’ll have to play the cards that have been dealt. Please, please have your fire chief be insistent that he communicate with his community.”
Vasquez said one of the things that impressed him about Buckley “is how prepared he had been in his knowledge and understanding of Kansas City — how it worked, what the issues are.”
“You have my commitment that the chief will be present and throughout the community and make sure that he is responsive to the entire community’s needs,” he said.
Grant told Vasquez that “we’ll have to follow up on this to talk a little bit more about (it) because, as you know, we’re very concerned.”
In late 2020, The Star published a series detailing longstanding discrimination within the Kansas City Fire Department ranks, prompting the U.S. Department of Justice to launch an investigation. The DOJ notified the Kansas City legal department in January 2025 that it was ending the investigation without taking any action.
Who else applied for fire chief?
Other candidates for Grundyson’s replacement included Deputy Chief Laura Ragusa and Deputy Chief and Fire Marshal James Dean, both of whom have lawsuits pending against the city.
Ragusa, KCFD’s chief medical officer, is the highest-ranking female member of the fire department in uniform. She has two advanced college degrees and has applied for the chief job three times since former Chief Donna Lake retired in January 2023 . Dean has an advanced college degree and has been with KCFD for nearly four decades.
Ragusa’s lawsuit, filed in February 2025, alleged that Grundyson had retaliated and discriminated against her after she informed him of what she believed were illegal and unethical practices related to department contracts and reporting requirements for federal reimbursements.
In June, Ragusa was granted permission to amend the suit to include new allegations regarding what she says are the city’s unfair and discriminatory hiring practices in picking a new fire chief.
Dean, who is Black, filed a lawsuit on Dec. 19, accusing the department of “discriminatory, hostile and retaliatory conduct.”
The lawsuit said Dean had applied for the fire chief position when Lake retired in 2023. It alleged that the most qualified internal applicants — and the only ones with graduate degrees — were minorities, including Black men and white women.
“Despite his qualifications, Plaintiff was never interviewed for the Fire Chief position and was never asked to complete a questionnaire or otherwise participate in the selection process,” the suit said.
Instead, it said, the city rejected the entire applicant pool “because it contained no highly qualified white male applicants.”
In December 2023, the lawsuit said, the city removed the “interim” designation from Grundyson’s title, making him the fire chief.
Grundyson, a white male, “did not meet the posted qualifications for the Fire Chief position, including the requirement of possessing a college degree,” the suit said. It also alleged that Grundyson “has publicly expressed hostility toward diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives and declared that such initiatives were ‘going away,’ despite directives from the City Council to create and implement a DEI program with a strategic plan.”
For years, the lawsuit alleged, the fire department had manipulated promotional processes to the disadvantage of Black firefighters. Among the tactics, it said, were altering eligibility criteria, engineering subjective testing processes and making lateral personnel moves to avoid promoting qualified Black candidates.
Dean’s lawsuit also accused KCFD of tolerating racially hostile conduct, including “overtly racist incidents” and failing “to meaningfully investigate, discipline, or remediate such conduct when it is reported by African American firefighters, including incidents involving explicitly racist symbols and conduct during training and academy environments.”
The city’s failure to investigate or correct the conduct has only resulted in emboldening it, the suit said.
“Defendant has continued, and is continuing, the pattern and practice of discrimination and retaliation against Plaintiff, including but not limited to continuing to pass him over for the Chief position, preventing him from even applying for the Chief position, and changing the qualifications to intentionally exclude Plaintiff from the process.”
Another lawsuit involving KCFD was being heard by a Jackson County jury this week. Filed in 2024 by Fire Capt. Anthony Seymour, the suit alleged that Seymour was retaliated against by department leaders when he reported discrimination and mismanagement concerns.
More about the new chief
Buckley served as interim fire chief in Orlando from August 2021 to October 2022, according to his resume. He was elevated to that position when Fire Chief Benjamin Barksdale resigned after being accused of punching a 55-year-old man and his daughter in a North Carolina restaurant.
Before that, Buckley had been a deputy fire chief in Orlando since November 2020. Prior to taking the Orlando job, he was an assistant fire chief of the emergency services division for the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority Fire and Rescue Department.
Other jobs during Buckley’s 45-year career, his resume says, were working for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is under DHS; the Virginia Department of Emergency Management; and nearly 35 years as battalion chief for the Fairfax County Fire Department in Virginia .
He has a bachelor of science degree in fire administration from Columbia Southern University, a private online university based in Orange Beach, Alabama, and a master of science degree from the university in fire executive leadership and emergency services management, according to his LinkedIn site.
At a Dec. 4 public forum in Kansas City that was held to introduce the three fire chief finalists, Buckley described himself as a “servant leader.”
“I’ve always been about serving people,” he said. “I’ve always been about taking care of the people that work with me and the people that work for me. I’m a guy that’s high visibility. I’m a guy that leads from the front, and I’m a guy that leads by example.”
Buckley told those attending that “there’s nobody that’s more passionate about the fire service than I am.”
“And the fire service is not an occupation; the fire service is a calling,” he said.
“And I’ve been fortunate enough to have been riding fire trucks since I was a young volunteer at 16 years old.”
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