A major shift in senior-staff assignments in the Menlo Park Fire Protection District — including the retirement of Deputy Chief Randy Shurson and the promotion of Harold Schapelhouman to that position — is expected to culminate in the hiring of a permanent fire chief before year’s end.
The changes, announced earlier this month, include reassignments of six other chief officers in the district. The appointments are the result of the retirements of three top officers and a restructuring of upper management.
Chief Doug Sporleder, hired last August as an interim leader to replace Chief Paul Wilson, said there are enough qualified officers in the district to hire a permanent fire chief from within the ranks. In the past, he noted, the district has hired chiefs from outside the district.
That’s a welcome endorsement for those district firefighters and officers who have grumbled for some time about the district’s recruitment of outsiders to serve as chief. An outsider has been chief since 1986, said Deputy Chief Schapelhouman.
Chief Sporleder, who had retired as longtime head of the Santa Clara County Fire Department, was hired to help guide the district board as it decides how best to choose a permanent chief. He also was asked “to evaluate the district, and either streamline it or make it more effective,” he said.
After a short time on the job, he saw a need to restructure the upper leadership so more junior officers could move up the ranks, and to give the district “a chance to make use of the talent within the department,” he said.
Retirements
To help create opportunities for junior officers, the district offered a “buyout” of $75,000 for chief officers to retire.In addition to Mr. Shurson, Paula Alloro and Jim Lichtenstein, both division chiefs, took advantage of the incentive and retired in recent months.
Mr. Shurson, with about 32 years with the district, left his second-in-command position at the end of March “with very, very mixed emotions,” he said. On the one hand, he’s 55 and can receive 90 percent of his salary as a retiree. “It’s crazy for me to keep working,” he said, adding that by leaving he is “also making room for the young guys.”
On the other hand, “I’m sad for what I’m leaving,” he said. That includes the “family” of colleagues and the intense satisfaction he took from the job, he said.
Although he’s no longer reporting for duty Mondays through Thursdays at the district’s Middlefield Road headquarters, Mr. Shurson hasn’t completely left the district behind. He’s signed a one-year contract to head the federal urban search and rescue task force overseen by the Menlo Park fire district.
He takes over the position from now-Deputy Chief Schapelhouman, who headed the task force for many years while working as the district’s division chief of special operations, although Mr. Shurson’s role has been somewhat curtailed.
The task force
The shift in leadership for the highly regarded Task Force 3, as the rescue team is known, was the result of recent funding cutbacks by the federal government. “Basically, we’ve received one-third less money this year than we had in the past year,” Mr. Shurson said.The task force was involved in search and rescue operations in New Orleans last year in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and had joined rescue and clean-up efforts in many other disasters, including after the September 11 terrorist attacks and the Oklahoma City bombing.
Mr. Shurson will be working fewer hours than his predecessor because of the funding cuts, and if federal money continues to shrink, the task force will curtail or eliminate its training program and move all its equipment — now housed in a nearby warehouse — to “an isolated area where we wouldn’t have any rent,” Mr. Shurson said.
That option “would be a hard pill to swallow, but we have to do the best we can do,” he said.
