By Brian Duggan
RGJ.com
TRUCKEE MEADOWS, Colo. — Twelve years ago, Charles Moore had seven months to build a fire district that would cover the region surrounding his longtime Colorado mountain home of Avon.
Moore, 55, had been the fire chief of Avon’s fire department since 1988. In 2000, voters agreed to merge Avon’s department and eight other surrounding departments into one fire district. After he was named fire chief of the Eagle River Fire Protection District, Moore had seven months to sort everything out.
Now, he has about three months to do the same thing in the Truckee Meadows. Washoe County Commissioners hired him Feb. 28 after a three-month-long national search that attracted 29 applicants.
By July 1, Washoe County’s new fire department is expected to be fully operational, marking the end of the county’s decade-long fire services contract with the city of Reno, which staffed and managed the Truckee Meadows Fire Protection District.
Earlier this month, commissioners approved a three-year, $126,500 contract for Moore.
City, fire and union officials in Colorado described Moore as a strong leader, someone who built a fire department from scratch and obtained federal grants to add more firefighters. He built a reserve program that attracted recent high school graduates and trained them how to be firefighters while they got an associate’s degree at a nearby community college.
“He was very easy to work with,” said Rich Carroll, the mayor of Avon. “He did a great job on the regionalization of a fire department out here.”
Over the last year, Moore’s former fire district faced a $1.7 million gap in its $7 million budget as a result of declining property values.
Moore officially left his office Dec. 31 but had announced his resignation in October before voters there nixed a proposal to increase property taxes to close the budget gap.
Moore said he and his wife had been discussing the possibility of leaving the department for more than year and moving to an area that featured less snow and more sun.
Moore said he knows he’s entering a contentious political situation between Washoe County and Reno.
City officials opposed the fire services divorce from the start, calling the fire services breakup dangerous and costly to county taxpayers, especially those who live in county islands like Hidden Valley and Caughlin Ranch. They added that it will set back the region’s efforts to consolidate.
County officials, meanwhile, said continuing the contract with the city would be too costly given substantial declines in property taxes largely used to pay for the fire services.
The county also objected to the city’s labor contract with firefighters that requires four-person crews instead of three-person crews.
“We need to look at the best way to serve the people; it is my hope we can come to some logical conclusions,” Moore said in a recent interview. “It’s about nothing but serving the public.”
Becoming chief
While he studied architecture in college, Moore’s career path took a different route after he and his wife wound up in Avon in the late 1970s.
He started work as a volunteer firefighter for the department there and was a full-time paid member of the department by 1981. Seven years later, he was the department’s fire chief.
Throughout the 1990s, the fire service contracts Avon had with surrounding fire departments in the Vail Valley were beginning to prove financially untenable, Moore said. The region is a resort area with a base population of about 37,000 that can reach 100,000 during peak tourism seasons.
Some departments needed more ladder trucks, while other departments protested the cost as unnecessary.
“It was always contentious with respect to funding,” he said. “It was always contentious with respect to service level.”
So, voters overwhelmingly approved the Eagle River Fire Protection District in 2000.
Moore said challenges as its fire chief included purchasing equipment, hiring firefighters and organizing the department on the administrative level, something he said should be easier in Washoe County because there’s already a support staff on hand to help him.
“I’m blessed to have that much help,” he said.
Going west
Moore said the budget troubles facing the Eagle River Fire Protection District played no part in his decision to resign from the fire chief position last October before voters turned down a proposal to raise property taxes to close the district’s $1.7 million budget gap.
“The tax question really had nothing to do with it,” Moore said. “I resigned before the voters even spoke. I’ve been talking to my (fire district) chairman since August, and my wife and I had been contemplating a move at least a year before that.”
And after living in the county where it starts snowing in October and sometimes doesn’t let up until June, “the weather got to be somewhat depressive,” Moore said.
Buz Reynolds, a former Avon mayor and now a town councilman, praised Moore’s work as the fire chief for the Eagle River Fire Protection District.
“It was tough times here, and I think he just wanted a change,” Reynolds said. “He’s been in and out of these economic waves for a long time, and they had something that was on the ballot, and it didn’t get approved, and he decided he just wanted a change from the Vail Valley.”
Meanwhile, Eagle River Fire Protection District did not officially recognize the labor group representing 46 of the district’s 72 uniformed firefighters. The union’s president said their relationship with Moore was mixed.
“He did build this department to what it is, and we all got jobs,” said Lt. George Wilson, president of the International Association of Fire Fighters Local 4245 in Avon.
The chapter was established in 2003 with 30 members. But because the union was not officially recognized by the fire district, communication with the district’s board of directors was limited, Wilson said.
“We were not allowed to communicate,” Wilson said.
Wilson added, “In the end we hope he does well and treats those guys fair and does a great job.”
Republished with permission from RGJ.com