On Demopolis

I&8217;m glad to be here in Demopolis, Ala. And I&8217;m happy that the mayor and the council gave me the opportunity to serve as the new fire chief. I think it took a lot of courage from them as well. And I&8217;m just so happy

to be here and

to serve as the

new fire chief.

On Allegations of women in his department being treated unfairly

In my experience in the fire service, at two of the departments that I worked in, I&8217;ve hired females. I made sure that they were very well treated fairly inside of the department. And even in the department that I grew up in and became fire chief in, I recommended that they hire a female as the fire chief.

On the grand jury investigation

Let&8217;s talk about the grand jury, or it was a special grand jury, there was no judge. Just before that was given, that grand jury, it was supposed to be looking into the entire government, a process of looking into the entire government. A couple months before that, it was an efficiency study that was done with an outside source that came in and said that the fire department had made significant progress, it&8217;s well on its way.

On People&8217;s perception of Few

Anybody who distracted the town and didn&8217;t care about Ron Few coming into town,

you have to understand that I came in as one of the first department heads from the outside and that was different for them. And you have some people who don&8217;t like people who come from the outside. That&8217;s normal in a lot of cities. I think I overcame that. I don&8217;t think people, when they understood how important a good fire service became a part of their city, I think most of the distractions went away.

On The job

I heard about the job through a friend. He just called me and said Demopolis is looking for a fire chief as well. I was just sitting there thinking about how I wanted to get back into the fire service again. I missed it, you know, and I heard about Demopolis, Ala.

On his staff

This morning, if you saw the enthusiasm on their faces as I was speaking about having a community-based fire department, that I needed their help as well to make this effective. They have a good department and we could make it a better department.

They are starving for leadership as well. It&8217;s been sometime since someone was in that position. We talked about new beginnings and through that, I&8217;ve gotten some calls back from the firefighters saying that is exactly what we wanted to hear. You coming in new, you have some great ideas and what I&8217;ve talked about the fact that we are a fire department now but we will become a fire and EMS department. Those guys have gotten some expertise that they are not using, and they want to use that.