Lynchburg Fire Department assessment calls for hiring process overhaul with emphasis on diversity

The Lynchburg Fire Department has a lack of diversity that “directly affects trust” with the community, and significant improvements should be made in recruitment and hiring practices and department culture, a recent assessment revealed. 

The assessment, conducted by an outside consulting firm, Raftelis, was released to the public in early June and outlines 14 recommendations for improving the department’s climate and human resources policies. The report comes just before a new fire chief is set to join the department on July 1, following eight months of interim leadership.

In the meantime, city staff are diving into the results of the assessment to see what changes can be made now, and what strategies they can apply from lessons learned at the Lynchburg Police Department, where there have been similar recruitment challenges. 

It’s no small task for an entirely paid, career fire department with more than 200 employees, said Hollie Jennings, special assistant to the city manager for data analytics. 

“Any team is going to be better if you have diverse thoughts, diverse backgrounds, diverse experiences to all come to the table to move whatever your mission is forward,” she said. “And if your mission is one of the most important we have in the city — which is to protect, serve, save — and you’re figuring out how to take care of the whole community, you can’t do that without those varying perspectives and experiences and background.”

A closer look at the assessment

The city initiated the assessment in November 2025, when the former fire chief, Greg Wormser, was placed on paid administrative leave and then suddenly retired. The city has not released details about why Wormser was placed on leave because it is a personnel matter.

The final report states that the assessment started at an inflection point for the department, when personnel and legal matters resulted in the department’s top three leadership roles, including Wormser’s, simultaneously operating on an interim basis. 

Also at the end of 2025, two different videos showing department employees using racial slurs went viral and “compounded an already difficult period, drawing public scrutiny at a time when the Department was already navigating internal strain,” the study states. The videos raised questions about both the fire department’s internal culture and its relationship with the Lynchburg community, as described in the report. 

At the same time, the fire department does not match Lynchburg’s demographic composition: the department’s workforce is 7% Black, while Lynchburg’s population is 27% Black, the study reports. Less than 1% of fire department employees are Hispanic, Jennings said, and 14% are women.

“The inability of the community to see itself reflected in the fire service directly affects trust,” the report reads. And when the videos emerged, the report states, some residents, especially Black residents, no longer felt comfortable interacting with fire department employees when they needed help.

To conduct the assessment on that backdrop, Raftelis’ staff conducted a 96-question survey with department personnel, a series of in-person focus groups with personnel and community members, and a review of department policy in the realms of recruitment, hiring, promotion and discipline. Raftelis, headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, is a management, financial and strategic consulting firm for clients in the public sector, including local governments and utility companies.

The results of the study point to numerous concerns and areas in need of improvement and highlight that the department needs both intentional outreach to communities it does not currently interact with and an internal environment that retains diverse employees once they’re hired.

The department currently does not have a formal recruitment strategy — with no sustained outreach to local high schools, colleges, paramedic programs or community groups — which limits the demographic diversity of who applies for jobs in the fire service, the report reads. 

About 29% of survey respondents agreed that the department’s hiring process attracts the most qualified candidates from all backgrounds. There’s no requirement for hiring authorities to document the reasoning behind hiring decisions, the study reads. There is no structured independent review of non-standard selections, there’s no way to confirm that interview techniques are being applied consistently across hiring cycles, and hiring panel notes are not retained in a format that allows for analysis over time, the study continues. 

And once hired, non-white and female firefighters experience the department differently than white male firefighters, the assessment reports. 

Survey-takers were presented with positive statements about the department and their work environment and were asked to rate their level of agreement with each statement on a scale from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree.” Non-white survey respondents reported 61% overall agreement with the questions, compared to 76% for white respondents. Female respondents reported 67% overall agreement compared to 75% for male respondents.

In focus groups, female firefighters described “patterns of punitive station assignments, additional burdensome duties, and retaliation for using formal reporting mechanisms,” and their discomfort navigating facilities without separate gender bathrooms and sleeping quarters; firefighters of color raised concerns about “racially disparate treatment in discipline, assignments, and advancement.” 

Best practices for recruiting and retaining first responders 

John Spinner was the third Black member of the Lynchburg Fire Department, hired in 1972. The first was hired in the late 1960s, he said. 

When he started his role as the human resources officer for the fire department in 2000, he said, minority and female firefighters represented about 2% of the department. A decade later, that number was about 22%. 

“It became my personal responsibility that I put upon myself to be that person that was standing on the rung on the ladder, and each time I climbed the rung, I brought another,” Spinner said.

His HR strategies included making sure “everybody went in the same door” by keeping policies consistent for all applicants, and recruiting and hiring for merit rather than solely looking at an applicant’s prior experience. Before, the department had a habit of only hiring firefighters who had prior experience and training — often white, male volunteer firefighters from the counties surrounding Lynchburg. 

The HR position that Spinner once held has not existed since he retired in 2010, Jennings said. Today, Spinner said, diversity is “undervalued” in public safety, and that’s a detriment to a service that all residents need to have confidence in during an emergency and a service that needs to extend empathy to all residents when they’re experiencing an emergency. 

“We are the ones that have you in the back of the police car or in the back of an ambulance, and that has to be trusted by the community,” Spinner said. “It’s important for the community to look at the fire department and police department as their community.”

Recruiting, hiring and retaining diverse firefighters is “a universal challenge,” said Robert Avsec, who served with Chesterfield County’s fire and EMS department for 26 years before retiring in 2007. Since then, he has written extensively about leadership and management issues in the fire service. 

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2020, about 5% of paid career firefighters were women and 8% were Black. Fire departments across the nation face challenges in sustaining sufficient candidate pools, let alone diversifying them, the assessment of the fire department states — and the issue has become more pronounced as fewer people pursue public safety careers and competition for public safety talent increases.

The key, Avsec said, is being intentional at every step of the hiring process. 

In the recruitment phase, that means connecting with children early — long before they start training to become firefighters or paramedics — so they know that anyone can become a part of the fire service. Recruitment is constant, Avsec said: every truck and ambulance should be stocked with recruitment material in case a community connection is made while on a call. 

Recruiting materials should emphasize that firefighting today isn’t just about putting out fires, Avsec said. In Lynchburg, for example, 83% of calls to the fire department since 2016 have been calls for emergency medical services, according to the study. Young people may better picture themselves as firefighters if they know that the job takes many forms and helps the community in many ways, he said. 

In the hiring phase, interview panels need to be diversified, Avsec said, to avoid implicit bias in hiring decisions and create a culture for new recruits “from day one … that there are other people in the department that don’t look like me.” 

The department’s assessment states that interview panels should be diverse in terms of demographics, tenure and position — a setup that’s “critical to ensure each candidate is fairly evaluated and selection decisions reflect the needs of the organization rather than the preferences of an individual interviewer.”

At the step of initial and continued training, Avsec said, curricula should be designed to remove barriers for people to become and remain firefighters, not create them. When you hire diverse first responders, everybody will show up with different strengths and a different skill set, Avsec said; training should build on first responders’ talent and enthusiasm and fill in the gaps of skills they’re missing, rather than expect everyone to have the same resume. 

“What you don’t have in strength, you get trained in technique. What you can’t overcome in technique, you get trained with partnerships,” Spinner said.

In the end, casting a wide recruitment net “is a matter of survival” for fire departments across the country, Avsec said, in order to keep up with hiring demands in the face of a national firefighter shortage, as many retire or step away due to burnout. 

The Lynchburg Fire Department has 13 vacancies for sworn first responders, Jennings said, and it often falls into a “rut” of repeatedly relying on the same talent pools for recruits. 

Moving forward, the fire department should establish a recruitment process to better reflect the Lynchburg community and reach new or underrepresented talent pools, the study states. It recommends that the department establish regular outreach to local schools and colleges, increase participation in community events and with civic organizations, and develop accessible candidate resources such as informational sessions to accomplish that goal.

Looking ahead, while looking to the police department as a model

The city announced earlier this month that Brad Creasy, currently the executive director of the Virginia Department of Fire Programs, will be the new chief of the Lynchburg Fire Department starting in July.

According to the assessment, there was broad consensus that the chief should be hired from outside the department, as study participants cited the need for a chief who can lead without allegiance to existing factions and bring an external perspective on internal reform. 

Creasy is tasked with addressing the challenges identified in the report and accomplishing a set of first-year goals, according to the report, but Raftelis representatives said at a city council work session earlier this month that the new chief will need to dedicate at least five years of concentrated effort to correct the department’s areas of concern.

The assessment makes 14 total recommendations for improvement. Four of them are directly related to recruitment and hiring processes. The rest range from integrating EMS as the primary function of the department, reforming personnel and communication processes, and creating human resources infrastructure to sustain those improvements over time.

The first step in making progress toward those recommendations came Tuesday night, when the city council voted 7-0 to amend the 2027 fiscal year budget and appropriate up to $310,800 to the fire department to fund a new full-time human resources leadership position and a new full-time training coordination position.

While the long list of recommendations can feel daunting to accomplish, Jennings said, the city has been tackling similar challenges in the police department in recent years and has some takeaways it can apply to the fire department. 

In 2023, the police department had 33 vacancies for sworn officers, which created significant challenges in keeping operations running smoothly, Jennings said. 

The city launched a recruitment and retention overhaul to fill the gap, she said. The strategies included analyzing hiring policies to pinpoint where barriers existed to joining the force; instituting a bonus system for recruits who sign a contract to commit to staying in the department for at least three years; and seeking recruits outside traditional criminal justice programs at colleges.

The 2023 recruitment redesign created plans with both the fire and police departments in mind, Jennings said. But at the time, the fire department only had five sworn vacancies, so the immediate need was in the police department, and that’s where action was taken.

One of the most significant structural changes in the police department, Jennings said, was creating a full-time recruiting position, which is held by Elsa Ramirez. She spends her days meeting kids in Lynchburg City Schools, interacting with community members at events across the city and traveling around the country to spread the word about the Lynchburg Police Department. 

Ramirez said her job often entails breaking down the perception of “what a police officer looks like” — which comes down to a combination of educating young people about what the job entails and reminding them they’re talented, and loved and valued in their community. 

“Why don’t you think you can do it?” Ramirez said she frequently asks minority students who have never considered law enforcement as a career. “It’s really about breaking down those barriers and having those conversations, so that way they can understand, ‘You know what, I can actually do this.’”

And when students say, “It’s hard for people that look like me and you.” Ramirez said she responds, “Well, even more of a reason to do it. Why not accept the challenge of taking on those responsibilities and also showing that we actually can do it, that we can be great at what we do?”

Today, the police department has 14 vacancies for sworn officers, although that number fluctuates with the start of academies, and the next academy is scheduled for July, Jennings said. The police department is comprised of 16% Black employees, 3% Hispanic employees, and 33% female employees, Jennings said.

The work continues long after recruits are hired, Jennings said.

“In addition to the pieces of ‘How do we recruit more folks into the department?’ is ‘How do we change the climate within the department, so that people of color and women that work there tell other people this is a good place to work?’” she said. 

Spinner agreed, saying resistance to change can be hard to overcome and makes intention at every step of the recruitment and retention process all the more important. 

“If you work hard enough, you’re going to find your candidates. The other part of the recruitment is overcoming the resistance of the people that they’re working with,” he said.