Gilbert fire chief answers questions as he starts on job

Rob Duggan was named chief of the Gilbert Fire and Rescue Department at the June 28 Town Council meeting, replacing the retiring Jim Jobusch. Duggan started on the job July 11. The Gilbert Independent sat down with Duggan at the Public Safety Training Facility for a question-and-answer session shortly after he started. The conversation has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

Gilbert Independent: Tell us a little bit about who you are.

Duggan: “Well I grew up in Phoenix, Moon Valley. My dad moved us here for work like everyone else. I was 7 when we moved here the first year. …  On weekends and summers, we just spent it on our bikes riding in the desert doing different things, having fun out there. Our parents had no clue where we were, but we always showed up before the lights turned on doing that kind of stuff. … We didn't have Google back then. Back as kid, it was ‘OK, what if we do this? OK, we'll try that.’ And well, maybe it didn't go well, but you learned real quick what was a good idea and a bad idea. So that was kind of a pretty typical upbringing back then.

“And then school-wise, [I] had a chance to go down to University of Arizona. My roommate, David Bruce, was going to go to medical school. His dad was a D.O. (doctor of osteopathic medicine), and he was going to follow in those footsteps. And he said, ‘Hey, let's take an EMT (emergency medical technician) class.’ I thought, ‘all right, kind of sounds interesting.’ I went down to U of A going, ‘eh, maybe I’ll get like a research job or maybe medical school eventually.’ I wasn't sure. And I took the EMT class, loved it down there and had a chance to get a summer job working for a private ambulance firm down there. Did that, enjoyed it and then [it] kind of evolved from there.

“I had a chance to volunteer at a place called Rincon Valley Fire District. That's just east of Tucson in Vail. Did that, liked it. Fire Chief Karen Hollywood gave me a chance. She said, ‘Hey, if you get your medic (certification), I’ll hire you.’ So I got to work as a medic with her for about two years, and my wife, Sally—we met like many others down in college. So we were married by then a couple years. All of our family was up here in the Valley. We were kind of looking to get back. All of our friends that were at U of A graduated, gone on with their lives, so we realized, ‘hey, maybe it's time to try to get back up here, be closer to family.’ And she saw a job posting in the in the newspaper of all things that Casa Grande was hiring for paramedic firefighters. So [I] applied for that and got on with Casa Grande, did that for about three and a half years. [We] lived up in the Ahwatukee area. So that kind of got us back to the Valley. And from there, I got on a chance with Gilbert in ‘99 and here we are today, last seven years as an assistant chief.

“Sally, we're at 28 years married now. So I’ve been very fortunate, very lucky, you know, in our marriage and our life. [We have] one daughter, Maddie. She's 22. She's a creative kid. She's living actually in Brooklyn, New York, of all places, 3,000 miles away.”

(On two points in life that made a difference in his life)

Duggan: “School came easy to me. It was actually, I think, my freshman year history class. It had to have been the first semester, and the grades are coming out. And the teacher, he was kind of talking about grades. He was passing out grades, I think for the first quarter or the first semester. And he obviously had a chance to look at them, and so maybe there was not such great grades, but he was just like, ‘you know, some people are good at one thing. Some are good at others. Some just understand, some struggle. Focus on what's good.’ And out of left field, he says, ‘for some, all the subjects come easy for school,’ and he said my name. … At first, I was terrified because no one wants to get singled out in the middle of the class in high school. Nobody wants that. But something about the way he did that—and I'm sure he has no idea that truly became an impact in my life—but suddenly, I was like, ‘hey, you know what? Yeah, maybe I should really try to do good at this stuff.’ It was just kind of one of those weird things where at that moment I kind of really started focus in on trying to do well. And so I did all that and was successful through high school—National Honor Society, top whatever percent of the class.

“And then as time came to graduate, all my buddies, every one of my friends, were going to U of A, ASU, a few went out state. And in our house, my mother is very fair. In our house, you get your junior college degree and then go to college. … I hit a state of depression realizing I'm about to watch every friend I have go off to college, and I'll be at home at a junior college, working. … There was a counselor that [we] sat with her. I was going for biochemistry, [but it] ended up being a microbiology degree. My mom was talking with her. ‘What are the plans.’ She kinda goes through it. Mom says, ‘Well, you know, we do the junior college thing.’ And the  counselor says, ‘Well, if you're doing it to save money, just so you know, but with this type of degree, he's going to need four years at the university. So even if you get a junior college associate’s [degree], you're still going to have to pay for four years. And I don't know what happened, but by the time we got home and mom talked to dad, I was filling out an application to go to University of Arizona. I was thrilled, and my sister still holds against me. [laughs] … That's a long-winded story, but those are two truly pivotal moments in my life.”

Gilbert Independent: One of the goals you talked about when you were hired was innovation. How do you see that playing out as fire chief? What would you like to do?

Duggan: “The innovation is important because if you talk about fire, fire departments and fire chiefs have to be relevant, but defining relevant means you're effective and you're efficient in how you do your job. Relevance means we're providing the services we need to protect the community and protect the responders out there doing their job. A great example when you talk about innovation is the ambulance transportation business. That's an innovative service that makes sure we're relevant because we're providing a critical service to our citizens and residents to be able to take people to the hospital for that. And now our town council can direct that operation. We have control in making sure that we have the right resources for that as we move forward.

“Looking at innovation, the things we look at is for our crew members, our responders, whether that's on a fire truck, on an ambulance, we're looking for innovation makes us better, faster and safer. So where we start is, ‘Is this innovation going to make us better? Faster? Safer? Yes. Perfect.’ That's an innovation we want to do. The people we respond to, our customers, are similar. They have similar wishes. They want us there fast. They want us to look professional, act professional and fix their problem or get them to start fixing their problem. Now we have also a lot of professional support staff … and a lot of times with our professional staff, what they're looking for in innovation is, ‘Is this going help with workload demands?’ Another thing that our professional staff really look for is, ‘Does this innovation help connect them to the residents we provide service to?’

“You know, sometimes someone—an assistant chief or a fire chief—goes to a conference and there's this new shiny thing, … How is it going to make us better, faster, smarter? Is it going to help our professional staff? Is it going to improve patient outcomes? If it's no, we might want to say, maybe that might be good, but this other thing is going to do this. So we kind of have to be careful that we're not just innovating for the sake of it.

“[For example] can our emerging drone and robotics divisions … if we have a drone operator arrive on scene that can give us views to the backside of a house, maybe there's a house fire where a commander is sitting up front. They don't have eyes to the backside of that house or that building. So we get that drone up in the air and that allows much more accountability to the scene commander, because they're going to see stuff that they normally might not see.

 “We have a working on robotics as well like a lot of other departments. Let's say in commercial buildings where we need to get information from the inside of that building, but maybe we don't know exactly what's in that building. We can send the ground robot in ahead of the crew so we can get information. We have the sensors attached to it so we can verify what the circumstances are inside. … So we kind of verify it's safe to make entry in that.”

Gilbert Independent: You have said you wanted to make Gilbert the department of choice, making it the destination fire department. Where do we stand on that? And what would you like to see going forward?

Duggan: “The why statement I use to relate it to the destination fire department, ‘Does everyone feel safe, valued, and have an opportunity to thrive?’ Those are the hallmarks I'm using. We have processes in play that allow employees and voices to be heard all the way up to the fire chief's level. One of the initiatives we'll be working on as part of the, the first kind of 30-60-100 days is to reach out to our stakeholders, all of our employees, and say, 'How do we communicate better?' If the leadership team has a message that that's important to get out to all of the members, how do you want to digest that? Email isn't always the right answer. One of the challenges we have, you have 11 stations, two battalions, six battalion chiefs. They do a really good job trying to communicate some of those messages, but shifts and people are off and the busyness of our stations. Sometimes we're challenged with that unified message. So part of it is we want to make sure we can have the stakeholders tell us, ‘How do you want to receive this information?’ and we'll do it.

“And the valued is, ‘How do we bring these ideas forward?’ We have some tools that we have as far as committees. We have an apparatus committee that talks about how we're going to build our fire trucks. We have our operations committee that talks about, ‘Hey, we're going to get into new extrication equipment.’ So if you have a passion for that, you can jump on that team and you can be a part of the team that assesses what's the best extrication tool for us. So to make sure that employees know … if you have a passion about something, let's connect you to that passion and that group so that you can be a part of it. And that way your decisions and your recommendations can be considered when the time comes to make decisions.

“The opportunity to thrive is a big one. We all define that differently. And it's important as leaders in the organization, we listen to our employees and understand. I had a firefighter for a long time on one of my fire trucks, one of the best ones we have as far as getting work done, and his currency—I use currency a lot with this—is he wanted to help make us better. And as a captain, that's the type of firefighter you want.

“For example, we had a couple instances in the town where we had responses to commercial locations, and they all had locked gates of different kinds. That's a barrier for us, and they all are a little bit different. And so we said, ‘Hey, this held us up by a few minutes because it added a few more minutes before we get there.’ And we said, ‘OK, well, we have to do hydrant inspections. How about if we go to the commercial part of town, and as we were doing hydrants, we stopped by every commercial property that had a gate, and we said, ‘OK, let's look at it during the daylight when it's open.’ I mean, there's certain commonality. Some have motors. Some don't have motors. So we would just go and look. Because of that desire for him to make us better, we developed the whole process on, ‘Hey, if we have a gate, this is what we're going do.’ That's how he wanted to thrive. That was his currency.”

Gilbert Independent: Gilbert is quickly moving toward build-out. How does the Gilbert Fire and Rescue Department keep up?

Duggan: “That's an excellent question. … We have to make sure we have the people, the programs and the processes before [build-out] happens. When I say people, that's responders, operations, responders on the fire trucks or low-acuity trucks, our transportation responders. We need to make sure that we're ahead of that because as build-out approaches, the funding mechanisms for the town are going change. We can kind of count on some increasing funding sources, [but] we know those are going to flatten. As we build our resources, [we have] to make sure that we have enough before that happens, so that we're ready for it. The fire department has had a strong tradition. All the previous fire chiefs have had a strong tradition of staying ahead of that process.

“Right now, we pride ourselves on running lean. There's a price to pay for that. And part of the justification I'm looking for are we also need to make sure that our professional staff development match that. Both of those are equally important. We are fortunate to be getting some positions this year that help us maintain the staffing numbers for our operations staff. But looking into next year, we really need to focus on that professional staff side, our civilian employees, because workload increases. So we need to match those and work on those justifications. A lot of my work will be working with our division managers to make sure that we have really good business cases based on the data that we're providing so that our policy makers can make good decisions. We know those are scarce resources.”

Gilbert Independent: Is there anything else that you would like to tell the community?

Duggan: “I'm obviously excited about Gilbert Fire and Rescue department. I do believe that our firefighters, our transportation staff, our professional staff are incredibly committed, providing service and making sure the community and our firefighters are safe.

“We're approaching build-out and it's our obligation to make sure that we remain relevant, we're efficient and we're effective and are ready to respond to any challenge. And we are.

“This place, this training facility, when we started building this, I talked about influencing the nation, and people kind of chuckled. “Come on, Gilbert? You're in this little town in the corner of the Valley. It's already happening. We have been open a year. And part of that recipe for innovation we have out here, we have incredible employees, subject matter experts that we can bring out here and become experts in the region. And then we start to bring in other vendors—SRP, Union Pacific, Southwest Gas—to be a part of this. And again, it allows us to have partnerships to further put us on the leading edge of some of these mitigative efforts so that our crews will be the best trained crews in the Valley. But we're also trained and focused on those leading-edge concerns and problems so that when we show up to the house, we're going to get there fast. We're going to look professional. We'll be professional and will fix your problem. Our crews are amazing with our patients out there and will continue to be. They'll be there for you.”