BY RACHEL LELAND
League City’s new fire chief Jeffrey Allen looks to reduce response times As League City has grown in the past decade, so has its fire department. That growth will be some of what new League City Fire Chief Jeffrey Allen, who was appointed Oct. 4, will be focused on. Allen spoke to Community Impact about staffing, response times, fire prevention and new projects in town. This interview has been cut for length, style and clarity. What will your priorities be as fire chief? The main priority I have is ... how do we reduce our response times? That’s a big one and a big goal for the city. ... If we can shave off anything, 30 seconds is huge. And we’ve got a pretty decent response time right now. If we can make it better, that’s just better customer service we can provide for the citizens. The other one is going to be
expanding recruitment efforts. How is the department building up capabilities to respond to challenges with new industries coming into town, such as battery storage facilities? We’ve got a significantly diverse group of individuals that volunteer, who have a huge knowledge base in all sorts of different topics. We’ve got guys that are regularly dealing with battery sites in their full time job. Not only are we going to lean on the developer or business ... but we’ve also got guys in-house that are going to be able to provide training. What’s the status of the two new fire stations being built? Station 7, we’re working on a contract with an architect. Once we get a contract in place we can move forward with the programming and design of the station ... then move into development of it. But something to keep in mind is that we’re planning fire stations right now in areas that don’t have streets yet. ... As far as Station 8, Station 7 will come first, obviously, and then Station 8 will come after that.
COURTESY LEAGUE CITY
Powered by FlippingBook