San Francisco Fire Chief Joanne Hayes-White, the first woman ever to lead the department and the longest-serving big-city fire chief in the country, told her department on Monday she’s retiring.
She has agreed to stay on the job until spring to give Mayor London Breed time to find her replacement. Her ideal retirement date, she said, is May 5, 2019, a “small tribute” to the late Mayor Ed Lee, who would have turned 67 that day.
By that point, Hayes-White will have held the job for 15 years and four months — more than a decade longer than the average tenure for a big-city fire chief. The 54-year-old Hayes-White, who joined the department in 1990 as one of its first female firefighters, started thinking about retiring last year. But in a meeting with Lee in the summer of 2017, he persuaded her to stay on the job through his second term, which would have ended in January 2020.