Fire Chief David Lantzer resigned as head of the Hermosa Beach Fire Department last Thursday.
Lantzer, who has served as fire chief for more than six years, expects that his last day will be Oct. 8. Lantzer said he is taking a new position as head of the City of Murrieta Fire Department in order to be closer to his family in the Imperial Valley.
Lantzer leaves with a debt of gratitude to his co-workers.
“We have a very caring group of firefighters,” he said. “They work hard to make sure that if you dial 911, you’re going to be taken care of.”
Lantzer arrived in Hermosa Beach at the height of the recession, and said that budgetary difficulties dominated the early part of his tenure.
“We had the recession, and we had the [Macpherson] oil lawsuit, and we had to make some tough cutbacks,” Lantzer said in an interview.
As the city weathered financial difficulty, Lantzer said he has more recently been focused on trying to return the department to full strength. The department has recently hired a new emergency manager and a new fire inspector, he noted.
“We are in a position of trying to rebuild,” Lantzer said. “We are getting caught up on disaster preparedness, we are getting caught up on fire and life safety.”
Among the changes that altered the department during Lantzer’s tenure was a shifting relationship with neighboring fire agencies. When Lantzer began, he said, it was more common for the city to help respond to emergencies in nearby municipalities. Now, the city is increasingly calling on other agencies to help deal with its own.
“We’re using our neighbors more,” Lantzer said. “We’ve laid the groundwork, but we are still assessing, how do we address increased call volume?”
Call volume to the fire department declined in 2010, Lantzer’s first full year on the job, but has increased in each subsequent year, he said, attributing the increase to the improving economy drawing more people to Hermosa.
Lantzer has recently focused on trying to innovate ways of addressing the increase, which tends to be focused at certain hours of the day and certain days of the week, especially weekends between 9 a.m. and 9 p.m.
“We need to look at peak-hour staffing,” he said. “We’ll always have constant, 24-hour-a-day staffing, but we have to address the extra workload during certain time frames.”
Like most other California cities in the past few years, Lantzer’s tenure also included some battles over compensation for fire department personnel. In 2012, the city police and fire unions criticized plans for extensive cuts to salary and benefits, and the fire department bemoaned a lack of staffing. (At the time, Lantzer insisted that agreements with neighboring agencies meant that emergency response times would not suffer.)
Whoever takes over as fire chief would have to focus on “sustainability” in budgeting, Lantzer said.
“We want to meet our needs today without compromising the needs of the future,” he said.
At the same time, Lantzer urged people to recall the sacrifices that municipal employees make, which sometimes don’t get recognized.
“Our firefighters haven’t had raises in I-don’t-know-how-long,” he said. “The civilian staff, the city staff, the department heads — they aren’t just here [during business hours], they’re here beyond that.” ER
