Anchorage

After 65 years, Chugiak’s volunteer fire department hires its first paid chief

Slogans emblazoned on Chugiak Volunteer Fire & Rescue Company rigs declare, "All Volunteer All the Time," but recently, that changed a bit.

After 65 years, Chugiak's volunteer fire department has hired its first-ever paid fire chief.

In some ways, the move, first reported by the Alaska Star, reflects the growth of a community north of downtown Anchorage that has tripled in size since 1980. The fire company, which responds to fires and emergency medical calls from the north edge of Eagle River to Anchorage's municipal boundary at the Knik River, is on track to respond to close to 1,000 calls this year, the most in its history.

But longtime administrators say the hiring of the new chief, Tim Benningfield, is also about preserving the larger volunteer operation, a point of fierce pride.

As chief, Benningfield, who started work Aug. 1, is helping with all the regulatory, training and budgetary requirements once handled entirely by volunteers. Virginia McMichael, the longtime administrative officer at the department, and LifeMed paramedic Clifton Dalton have traded off the chief job without pay in recent years.

It just became too much, McMichael said — the volunteers come to fight fires and help hurt or sick people, not do paperwork or politics.

"It's to get some support in here to ensure volunteers have time to do what they want to do," Dalton said recently in a conference room at Station 35, the administration headquarters.

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The department's independent spirit and "neighbors-helping-neighbors" attitude is a defining feature of Chugiak, a neighborhood bordered by Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson that tends to be more rural and isolated than other parts of Anchorage. The volunteer fire crews help cover an area that spans 50 square miles and roughly 20,000 people.

More than 100 firefighters volunteer on multiple shifts each month, covering every hour of the day. As of early November, crews had responded to nearly 900 calls, mostly emergency medical calls. Calls seem to rise when the Glenn Highway is in bad shape, Dalton said.

The volunteers include people hoping to end up in a paid career as a firefighter or paramedic in the Anchorage Fire Department. But there are also soldiers, college students, current public safety officials, Slope workers, stay-at-home parents and business executives in the mix. Volunteers are required to serve between 32 and 108 hours a month, which doesn't include training. At least about 52,000 volunteer hours have been logged this year throughout the department.

Plenty of people work day jobs, volunteer overnight and then clock back in to a day job the next morning, McMichael said.

The department's annual operating budget was just more than $1 million this year, paid mostly by the taxes from Chugiak-area residents. It amounts to less than one percent of the budget for the Anchorage Fire Department, which has a station in Eagle River and doesn't cover most of Chugiak, though an agreement allows the two departments to work together on major incidents.

"The cost of that level of service and what we provide — you just couldn't put a number on it," Dalton said.

Homesteaders in Chugiak created the fire department in 1952. The first "fire station" was in a wooden shed with a clunky door. More than once, the story goes, fire trucks busted straight through the shed door because it wouldn't open.

Now there are five stations scattered around the area, all decidedly more modern: "We've come a long way," McMichael said.

The other volunteer fire department within Anchorage's borders, in the skiing community of Girdwood to the south, has had a paid chief and assistant chiefs for a number of years. That department provides emergency response to the accident-prone Seward Highway as well as the Alyeska Resort.

The Chugiak department has long paid support staff, like an administrator, training coordinator and maintenance worker. But when it came to paying a chief or first responders, there hadn't been a need for it, McMichael said.

"We took great pride in the fact that it was all-volunteer and we were able to maintain that," McClure said.

Benningfield first volunteered for the department in 1980 when he was stationed at the military base. He's a Kentucky native who taught fire science at the University of Alaska Anchorage for several years. As the first paid chief, he's making about $98,000 in salary. He said it's been an easy transition with longtime volunteers like McMichael and Dalton still in the picture.

Benningfield will also volunteer 108 hours a month as a paramedic firefighter on top of his job as chief. He's been on a number of calls already, including the fire that destroyed a home far down on Eagle River Road last week. The Chugiak volunteers rushed in with water trucks to aid responding Anchorage firefighters.

In a conference room at the department headquarters recently, radios erupted with chatter every few moments. Benningfield, McMichael and Dalton would pause to listen.

"Our radios are never off," Dalton said.

Benningfield said he doesn't have big plans to change the department, since it's already running smoothly. He, Dalton and McMichael also said getting a paid chief doesn't mean they'll become a "career" department of paid firefighting staff. As long as recruitment stays steady, Dalton said, there's no reason it can't stay almost entirely volunteer forever.

They often get the question: Why do this for free to any degree?

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It's in the motto, they say, of neighbors helping neighbors. In a small community, it's often the case that a firefighter knows the person calling 911.

"It's gratifying to help someone," Dalton said. "No one calls us when they're having a good day."

Devin Kelly

Devin Kelly was an ADN staff reporter.

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