Brian Crawford noticed something curious during his two-year stint as chief of Plano Fire-Rescue: Lots of Dallas firefighters wanted to work in his city.
Crawford, who hired a few of them before he left this year to become Shreveport’s city manager, said plenty of firefighters want to work in Plano. And Plano officials liked being able to hire trained firefighters and put them on trucks quickly. But the experience level of the Dallas applicants struck Crawford as odd.
“Normally, it might be firefighters with one or two years,” he said. “But the last group, we had a couple of guys who had actually been in Dallas for a good long while. After five, six, seven years, normally you wouldn’t leave a department where you have that much seniority and that much vested.”
Crawford said he heard the Dallas firefighters were worried about their pensions. And firefighter group leaders share that worry, saying pension troubles and comparatively low pay have made Dallas Fire-Rescue just another rung on the career ladder for some.
The numbers seem to back up the fears. Dallas Fire-Rescue, which employs about 1,900 firefighters with a median age of 40, saw retirements and resignations spike in fiscal year 2011 and remain high every year since. Between fiscal years 2005 and 2010, the rate of retirements and resignations was three times smaller — about 1 percent of the department, sometimes lower.