A champion of consolidation

Ozaukee Central Fire Chief Bill Rice  could be called the father of consolidated fire and ambulance services in Ozaukee County.

Rice, who is retiring in March, was an advocate for combined services throughout his tenure and leaves as chief of a consolidated fire department.

It’s a consolidation that has worked well, improving fire and ambulance services to both Grafton and Saukville and increasing paramedic staffing in both communities.

“We work hard to make it work,” Rice said. “It helps everyone in the community.”

Rice, who will be 64 when he retires on March 13, began his career as a paid-on-call firefighter in Bayside when he was 18, and he stayed there for 15 years.

“What I heard often even then was talk of consolidation,” he said.

He was hired full-time by the Wauwatosa Fire Department in 1987, and he spent 27 years there, 16 as chief, while continuing to work in Bayside.

And even then, he said, he kept hearing about consolidation.

“But I couldn’t help but notice departments were so determined to stay on their own that they would make things more complicated,” he said. “And when we did need help, there were always delays. Communication difficulties. Different departments had different equipment, different policies.

“I witnessed that, and I thought consolidation makes sense.”

While he was working for Wauwatosa, Rice said, the North Shore Fire Department was formed when six communities consolidated their operations. It was a lesson in what it takes to successfully integrate departments, he said.

“You need leadership and management to believe in it,” Rice said, recalling the City of Glendale administrator and mayor were the driving force. “They were tough. They stuck to their vision. Instead of two systems trying to work together or not work together, they had one leader, one staff, one type of equipment and they quickly became much more efficient.”

Rice, who wrote a paper on the consolidation of South Milwaukee stations while at the National Fire Academy, carried those lessons with him when he joined the Grafton Fire Department as a volunteer firefighter in 2008.

In the summer of 2013, he became the first full-time chief in Grafton history.

It was a time of challenges as not only the Grafton Fire Department but all departments in the county as they started to grapple with the loss of volunteers.

“I could see the trend was going down in Grafton,” Rice said, so he presented a plan to hire a crew of six full-time medics to ensure the ambulance was staffed around the clock.

“I knew it wouldn’t fly, but it got us talking,” he said. “I just kept it up with the village. It wasn’t just something I wanted. It was something the village and town needed, and over time my voice was heard.”

In 2015, the village hired its second full-time person, assistant Chief Matt Karpinski.

Rice, who is an EMT, said that when he came on board in Grafton there wasn’t a paramedic on staff — well, there were some paramedics, but they couldn’t fully use their skills because the department wasn’t certified as a paramedic service.

“That was my first priority,” he said, adding those paramedics brought a plan to him  “and together we made that happen.”

When the pandemic hit, it brought the staffing situation further into focus, Rice said.

“It exposed our weakness in the county, and that was staffing,” he said, noting it was exacerbated by the fact ambulance calls were becoming the norm in communities.

Grafton, he noted, had 800 fire and ambulance calls when he came to the village and 2,300 at its peak.

Departments used mutual aid to cover shifts when they didn’t have enough people to staff ambulances, but that meant it took longer to get to those in need, Rice said. It took even longer in some cases because departments weren’t talking to each other, so no one knew which department would need help on a particular day.

It was about that time when Saukville’s fire chief left and the village, which had hired Grafton’s building inspector part-time, approached Grafton about doing the same for the fire department.

Rice ended up being chief of both departments.

“We immediately worked together like we were one department,” he said.

Staffing issues prompted the county departments to commission a study that ultimately recommended consolidation. Not everyone agreed. Mequon and Thiensville formed the Southern Ozaukee Fire Department, and the county’s northern departments created a partnership to provide medical services.

That left the four central communities — Grafton, Cedarburg, Port and Saukville.

“In the end it was just the two fire departments,” Rice said. “It’s worked very well. We worked hard to avoid conflicts. We focused on staffing, on being respectful of each other. And we put an emphasis on our full-time and part-time firefighters working well together.”

The 65-member department has 18 full-time paramedic-firefighter positions, one of which is open, and will hire an additional staff member this year.

“We’ve tried to make the organization one that people want to be a part of and then stay here,” Rice said.

That includes Rice, who said he decided that he would give the consolidated service a year to stabilize, then retire and spend more time with his wife Lisa, a retired office manager with the Glendale Police Department.

“It’s difficult for me,” Rice said. “I love this job. I like to go on calls. I like dealing with people. But I know it’s time for a younger person. I’m going to miss it.

“I feel like I could do it forever.”