Passing the Torch | New Asheville Fire Chief Michael Cayse

Michael Cayse has only been Asheville’s Fire Chief since the start of the year, but he came here with more than three decades of experience in Cincinnati and, as part of that, working with the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Asheville firefighters received a pay raise in the new fiscal year budget of nearly 9 percent, but that still puts them behind where they’d like to be. My guest today, Chief Cayse, tells us about the other ways Asheville works to be a department that attracts and keeps talent. We also talk about how today’s fire departments little resemble those of yesteryear, the demands and skills of the job that go well beyond traditional firefighting and Cayse’s thoughts about what his department needs to become a state-of-the-art unit.

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Transcript

Matt Peiken: Why did you decide to leave Cincinnati after 34 years there to come to Asheville?

AFD Chief Michael Cayse: I was timing out. I had to retire. December of this year, I had a mandatory retirement, so I was looking for new jobs. 

Matt Peiken: Wow. So it's mandatory retirement from that department, but you could go elsewhere. 

AFD Chief Michael Cayse: It was from the state. We were in the state pension system and I was timed out on that. 

Matt Peiken: Interesting. So at a certain point in Cincinnati, were you thinking, okay, I'm going to retire.

I've been in this game a long time. The work probably isn't a breeze. I can't imagine. Why were you so committed to continuing your career? 

AFD Chief Michael Cayse: No, I loved the job I had. My last assignment there was the chief in charge of special operations. So I got to do all the really interesting, fun stuff. Like I was in charge of the bomb squad. I was in charge of the fire boats. I was in charge of the hazardous materials team. So it was all pretty interesting and mind provoking kind of work. So I enjoyed that. 

Matt Peiken: And so did the job itself of being a firefighter, let alone a director, did it evolve a lot in the time you were there?

AFD Chief Michael Cayse: It did. So I started off as a firefighter recruit right out of the academy and then went to a paramedic unit for about four years and then went into suppression and worked on fire companies. And in that time period, we started evolving as to what we did in Cincinnati. Medical responses became more and more important.

The bomb squad started growing as we took on a regional asset with the FBI the fire boats became a bigger and bigger issue because the river out there is actually the second largest inland port in the United States. So the amount of commodities through there drove an increase in the need to have active fire boats.

So it did evolve quite a bit in my time period there. 

Matt Peiken: You just touched on something and you said it a little bit ago, you were part of a bomb squad. I didn't associate local fire department work with being part of a bomb squad. What necessitated that expansion of your role? 

AFD Chief Michael Cayse: There's only 11 fire department based bomb squads in the United States. Cincinnati just happened to be one of them. At the time that they created that bomb squad, the fire department was in a better position to be poised to take on that responsibility than the police department was. And by making it the fire department, they had a 24 hour response capability of four people assigned to that bomb squad on a regular basis.

So they would do medical calls and fire calls, but also be put together in the same group to respond as a bomb unit, instead of having to come from all over the city in different vehicles to staff a bomb unit. 

Matt Peiken: Now you also mentioned getting into emergency response, medical response. I know that's a big part of the role here. Did that start happening in fire departments nationwide at a certain point? Was that sort of a trend that was happening or did just individual departments, because of, scarce resources in cities have to take that on?

AFD Chief Michael Cayse: A very good question. So yes, it is an overall trend in the fire service to start taking on medical response capabilities to dual role fire and EMS response because it's overall, it's about safety of our constituents, of our residents.

So you started seeing different parts of the country grow at different rates in their medical response. So in the Midwest, where I was from most of the fire departments started taking on medical transport and also started increasing the level of basic training from first responder EMT up through the paramedic levels.

Matt Peiken: Does that change the person who enters this field? There's a certain romance as a kid to being a firefighter, just like there would be a certain police officer or being a cowboy, for that matter. Does the requirements for who goes into this profession, is it fundamentally different now than it was three decades ago?

AFD Chief Michael Cayse: It is. You have to set your expectations for, like, when you're recruiting. I spent four years in teaching in the fire academy and recruiting new people into that, and you have to be very clear with the people that you're recruiting that their responsibility is more than just fighting fires, more than just going on a fire truck, that they are actually going to be hands on, medically treating the people of our community.

And so with that said, that takes a different kind of skill set or a different kind of mindset of the individual. So you have to pretty much set their expectations coming in. 

Matt Peiken: And the training is different, isn't it? Because in some sense it seems like almost different skill sets, different professions.

So it's one thing to be a solid firefighter, it's another to be an empathetic first responder. How do those twain meet? And do some good firefighters flame out in a sense because they can't handle the other parts of the job? 

AFD Chief Michael Cayse: So With the medical side our firefighters here in Asheville and across the country for that matter are exposed to a lot of traumatic events and a lot of things that are very hard to deal with.

And so part of that training is also teaching them how to manage the events of what they see and how to go from day to day with that. And the medical training side is just as rigorous as the fire training side. When I went to paramedic school in 1987, and at that time it was only 240 hours long. Today, if you go to paramedic school, at least in Ohio and also here in North Carolina, it can be upwards of two years of training. So it's, you get a college degree for that now at an associates level degree for that. 

Matt Peiken: , You start out at that time in your life, you get an associate level degree, getting that grounding.

AFD Chief Michael Cayse: If you start now in the paramedic service in different parts of the country, it can be an associate's degree. It can be a certificate or a license, which may only be a year as well. So it varies by region. 

Matt Peiken: Do people enter the field first through firefighting, like they want to be a firefighter, then get this more broad education? Or do they come in from a healthcare perspective and then come into firefighting on the back end? 

AFD Chief Michael Cayse: I think the vast majority of people enter this field to be firefighters first, and then they accept that and they embrace the fact that being the medical responder is part of the job. 

Matt Peiken: Yeah, correct me if I'm wrong in this, you're part of the law enforcement division, you're right next to the police department here.

How did that start intersecting where police go into a situation where fire also has to go in, where it's a law enforcement call, and there's a role for fire when there isn't an ember burning? Talk about how that intersects your job with law enforcement. 

AFD Chief Michael Cayse: So I refer to it as we're all public safety responders, right?

It's more than that. Fire responds to public safety events, which may include law enforcement, but you're absolutely correct. Many of our responses are joint responses where we can't do our job without their being there and vice versa. And so we have a very good relationship with the police department here in Asheville.

And most of the time, if it's a violent scene, our firefighters will stage and be communicating with the police officers and they'll tell us when the incident is safe for us to enter. At that point, we can go in and render care to whoever needs it. 

Matt Peiken: We're facing an opioid crisis around the country. Obviously it's a big deal here in Asheville. How does your department intersect with what's happening in terms of street level drug use? Cause there are ambulances that go to scenes. Where do you and your staff fall into this? 

AFD Chief Michael Cayse: So we fall into it in a variety of different ways, and you're absolutely correct. The opioid crisis has taken off in the last several years here, as well as the rest of the country. But primarily Asheville firefighters are the first responders to medical incidents. So they're getting there usually before any transport unit or medical unit arrives. And what they're doing is doing the initial size of the initial life safety activities.

And then from that point, they are transferring care over to the transport units. In this area, it's Buncombe County EMS and they'll transport them. But a second part of that too is we also have our Community Responder Program, which is a group of seven to eight people that are assigned, whose job it is to find out the core reason that these people are having their issues and work with them to position them to get out of the problem that caused them to become addicted to the opioids. 

Matt Peiken: Yeah. I know a community responder team is a relatively new aspect of working with our community and fire is part of that, right?

So how does that work? What role does the fire department staff have within this response team? 

AFD Chief Michael Cayse: So currently, our community response program here in Asheville consists of five firefighters and a civilian oversight of management of the oversight and with the intention to hire on two more civilians who would be considered peer support persons.

And these two peer support persons are people who have lived a homeless life already and they understand and are empathetic with the homeless population or the unhoused population here within the city. Our firefighters and those peer support specialists work together to find the cause of the issue that got that individual to this position that they're in.

And then our peer support people are able to do that relating with them one-on-one so that we gain their trust. 

Matt Peiken: I don't know if I understood this correctly. So on the seventh person team, does the fire department have one position on this seven member team? 

AFD Chief Michael Cayse: We have five of the seven are firefighters. 

Matt Peiken: That okay. Five of the seven are firefighters. That's really interesting. So in a sense they have to play the role of like detective in a sense to understand what happened here? 

AFD Chief Michael Cayse: They all have great empathy and so they're there they volunteered to be in these positions They were not told to be in these positions.

They have a true desire to help our Residents in our community and so when they get there and they're made aware of somebody who's in need or in crisis, They look at that person, gain their trust and start talking to them to find out, how did we end up here? How did you get here? What caused you to be in this situation and they're looking for root causes so that they can address Not the band aid fix like Getting them out of their opioid addiction issue right then and there, but more of what caused you to be to the point where you're living on the streets and what caused you to start your addiction?

Once they know that cause, they work at addressing that to get them out of that situation as a whole. 

Matt Peiken: Wow. That's really interesting that there's such a committed role within the fire department for that, because I know there are nonprofits here that work with our police department. They take on psychological counseling roles.

They are addiction specialists. They also seem to have the same mission as your street team. Is there often a coordinated efforts or do your street teams run into other street teams that are helping and what are the different approaches? 

AFD Chief Michael Cayse: There's a tremendous amount of interaction between the nonprofits that exist in this city and our community responder team.

In fact, we have monthly meetings with all the nonprofits that are aimed at that same purpose to see how we can coordinate and help with each other. The huge difference is our team is mobile. It can go anywhere in the city, whereas most of the time the nonprofits are running their own facility where they're supporting them at a fixed facility.

So when we have these interactions with these people, we know all the nonprofits that are in town, what their specialties are, and when we learn what's going on with this individual, we can push them to the direction of the nonprofit that could help them the most. 

Matt Peiken: How does your team get called into a situation? Is it usually from a public safety standpoint? There's somebody who could be harming others or they're doing harm to themselves or there's just a disturbance in public. How does your team even get brought into a situation? 

AFD Chief Michael Cayse: So there are multiple ways that you access our team services.

One of them is, Just through 911 calls, right? Somebody sees an unhoused person who's on the street laying down and they're concerned about it. So they call 911. So our fire companies would arrive there and they'll coordinate with getting our community responder folks there to assist as well.

Another way is people will see a homeless camp or they'll see some type of event that would cause them to be concerned about whatever's going on, a bunch of needles in a park or a bunch of tents underneath a bridge or whatever. And so when they call that into the city has one person in charge of coordinating the documentation of all those calls.

That documentation then gets sent to our community responders and they'll go out proactively to look at these tent cities or this park where these issues are being called in for and then assess to see what kind of needs are required at that point. 

Matt Peiken: You know, I would think in some level, it's a delicate balance because Police are also called. You have people who probably know some of these individuals by first name basis, that they're the people who are having struggles. It seems like your staff is in between that. You have your hands in all of it. On the scene, is there often a summit, in a sense, on this team between police, your fire staff, others on this team who are here to help, like, how do we best deal with this situation right now?

AFD Chief Michael Cayse: Sure, if the incident is not a violent incident at that time, our firefighters, our team, the community responder team, or our first responders in the various fire trucks will go there first. We intentionally go there first so that we can size up the issue, size up the matter and determine if there is a law enforcement need at that point.

Just because you're unhoused doesn't mean the law enforcement needs to be involved. And so our folks will look at that. If the scene is violent or if there's an issue that does require law enforcement needs, then we will make that notification and ask them to come there. But for the most part, we size it up first, determine what the needs are and go from there.

Matt Peiken: You were talking about things that fire departments everywhere are facing. Is there something fundamentally different and you're still very new here. Is there something different about your role and what your staff does here in Asheville than in Cincinnati or name your other metropolitan area. Is Asheville Distinctive in terms of its challenges here.

AFD Chief Michael Cayse: I think every city has their own distinct challenges. Unlike Cincinnati, Asheville has a huge wildland urban interface issue, right? So I didn't have to deal with forest fires in the city of Cincinnati.

Matt Peiken: Unless it was Mount Airy. 

AFD Chief Michael Cayse: It was a Mount Airy Yes. But yes, here, of course you have that issue and you have to plan for that and you have to be concerned about it.

The other thing is that the community here is smaller than the metro community where I'm from in Ohio. And as a result, our firefighters have to be the jack of all trades, if you will. They have to have more training and they have to have more specializations. That becomes an issue, and every community manages that differently.

Matt Peiken: Yeah, you've got more responsibility in the job, yet pay is still a struggle here. I know that APD, the police department, is down, when I talked to Chief Lamb, about 25 percent of its budgeted force. Where does your staffing stand compared to how much you're budgeted for?

AFD Chief Michael Cayse: So we're very fortunate here with Asheville fire. I just heard two days ago, we were at 98 percent of our budgeted staff. And and then in, on July 7th or 8th, I'm not exactly sure that first week of July, we're bringing on a recruit class of 16 additional people to account for any retirements that may occur over the next six months or so.

Matt Peiken: That's fascinating to me because Some of the conditions that I've understood from the police at least in the past several years, why they are understaffed, low pay being a part of it. Low pay was a big problem here within the Asheville Fire Department from what I understand, yet you don't have or didn't have the same staffing issues.

What's the difference there? 

AFD Chief Michael Cayse: I can't speak for the police department. What I can say for fire is we focus on I guess the total picture, if you will. We want to make sure that our firefighters have great opportunity for career advancement. We are able to provide them a lot of extra certification type pays for if you speak a foreign language that benefits us here in the community when you're doing your responses, we give you money for that.

If you take on one of those specialty fields that we talked about before, like hazardous materials response, we give you funding for that. So if you get a college degree, which helps us as an organization grow, we give you initial funding for that. So in those ways, with the recent pay raise they got on top of all of these things, it really puts our firefighters in a competitive area.

Matt Peiken: So you just mentioned something that, in addition to salary, there are contributions to their furthering education. Is that something that has been part of fire departments everywhere for quite a while or is that a relatively new incentive that's been recognized, we need to do this for our department?

AFD Chief Michael Cayse: I think every Fire department values the increased education of their employees, right? So some departments do that in the way of tuition reimbursement. Other departments do it in the way of a percentage added to your paycheck after you receive your degree and other departments will say we will send you to these professional credentialing classes.

So it's a combination of what works best for that community. Our community here, we will send you to credentialing classes and we will supplement your income after you receive your degrees. 

Matt Peiken: I know that the fire department saw, or at least the staff saw, an 8. 8 percent pay raise in the latest budget that's starting July 1st, and that still puts starting salaries a few thousand dollars below that of some other departments like Charlotte and even, I understood, like the Enka Candler department.

Is that ever an issue? Oh, When our staff knows they can go elsewhere, even though you are at 98%, is attrition a problem? Do you have churn? Is that a problem? 

AFD Chief Michael Cayse: So when I came here, I was asked that question. I look at the attrition rates with Asheville fire versus Cincinnati versus other cities.

And our attrition rate is on par with everybody else's. We don't have any increase attrition versus somebody else. But you have to be real careful when you compare Asheville to other cities. Asheville cities is a lot different than Charlotte City. You know, It's completely different. So it's not apples and oranges.

The same with Enka Candler. While they may pay more, they may not have some of the other, we just talked about some of the subsidies they get for foreign languages, for education, the retirement side of it. But additionally we have matches for 401ks, 457s, so there's a lot of intangibles that are more over and above what you get with your basic, the annual salary is not the end all to the salary. 

Matt Peiken: Yeah. You mentioned in Ohio there was a ceiling over your head in terms of retirement. Does North Carolina also have same sort of, like if you've been here for X number of years, you have to retire? 

AFD Chief Michael Cayse: I am not aware that there is a retirement cap here in North Carolina.

Matt Peiken: Okay. So what are some things you want to see happen in Asheville? Where have you identified here's a gap. Here's something we're not addressing either well enough or we are blind to. What are some areas that you think need to change or evolve?

AFD Chief Michael Cayse: When I came here to the city of Asheville, I put together a list of objectives that I thought were in direction that we could as a whole move. And then I queried all the bureau chiefs within the department and said, Hey, what are your objectives? We then met and we put them all together.

And one of the biggest changes that we're pushing is for increased skill sets at the emergency medical level. So when our responders get to a scene, they're able to do more and they're trained to a higher level of training and then also an increased In the emergency management level, the way we handle disasters and incidents, whether it's a natural disaster like a hurricane or a flooding response or a hazardous materials response or even as simple as a water outage in a certain part of the city.

Matt Peiken: Which we've had. We have. Yeah. So are you saying that while cross our fingers we've managed so far, but that you For these certain circumstances that could come up, we are right now under resourced. 

AFD Chief Michael Cayse: No, I'm not saying that at all. What I'm saying is when I came here, there was a great deal of emphasis being put on that. And I saw that emphasis, I came from an emergency management background, and I wanted to add to our capabilities right now. Currently Asheville is in a very good position when it comes to how they handle any emergency that may occur. 

Matt Peiken: Yeah. I saw on your background that you had spent a lot of time with FEMA and how does that experience play into how you want to lead here, what, how this department needs to evolve?

AFD Chief Michael Cayse: I think one of the big things it does is that I know what it's like to come from somewhere else in the country, be plopped into a situation and help a community recover from that incident. And as a result of that, Because I see it from a different lens, if you will, from a different direction, I'm able to plug that lens into our planning process.

So I, I can say, when these organizations respond into your community, this is the kind of stuff that they're going to be looking to see if you've done or can do. 

Matt Peiken: You mentioned advancement. When I thought Chris budzinski was going to be part of this conversation, I'd seen on his background that he was part of different engines, squads, and battalions. Can you explain the difference between engines, squads, and battalions? 

AFD Chief Michael Cayse: Sure. As you come into the fire service, everybody starts with the same level of basic training. You come out of the academy and you're a basic qualified firefighter with the basic qualified medical stuff, and they put you in basically right in the backseat of a fire truck.

Everybody starts the same way. And then as you develop professionally, you start looking at what does your career path look like for you. For me, I went into a medical transport role first. I went into the training bureau and learned how to instruct after that. Then I went into the special operations side of things.

And for me, that was heavy rescue companies where I learned all the technical rescue aspects from, building collapses, to swift water operations, to helicopter operations, all of that. For other people, they might like to work on a ladder truck instead of an engine. So in a ladder truck, you would, you do all of the ventilation, you do all the search and rescue inside of the building, you do all the forceful entry to get into a building that's locked up.

On an engine company, if you went that route and you enjoyed that, you're the person who pulls the hose from the hydrant to the fire truck and into the building and puts the fire out with the water. But as you get to a point where you promote past being on a fire truck, then you might go into a command role after you've had that experience on a fire truck.

And now you might start leading the fires when you get there and directing what everybody should be doing. So Chris has had that huge background coming up through the ranks and serving in all those different roles. 

Matt Peiken: So what's a squad? What's a battalion? 

AFD Chief Michael Cayse: A squad is a group of people who have additional training over and above firefighting to include some technical rescue, and they're used as an extra force to help Fill the hole that's not being done at the fire because this fire is a little bit bigger on arrival, so they might need extra help.

A battalion. It refers to two different things. Geographically, it's a certain part of town. Asheville Fire has three battalions with certain amount of fire stations in each one of those battalions. But, each battalion, geographic area, is covered by a battalion chief. He's one person that runs all the fire companies in that geographic area.

Matt Peiken: So you can look at it, or tell me if this isn't true, as like a pyramid, that engines report to squads are part of a battalion. 

AFD Chief Michael Cayse: So I don't think any engine guy would ever let you say that. So engines, trucks, being ladder trucks, squads. They're all resources that do different things that need accomplished out of fire. So they all support each other. The battalion oversees all those four person fire trucks that are running around. 

Matt Peiken: Now you have a gleaming new building in the Montford neighborhood. Is that the envy of your whole department? Does everybody want to be assigned to that? What do they have there, because it's new, that other would you call it a precinct? That what it is? 

AFD Chief Michael Cayse: A battalion area, a running response area, basically. 

Matt Peiken: What do they have there that other response areas in Asheville say we need that here. 

AFD Chief Michael Cayse: Yeah, so the Facilities for actual firefighters are one of the huge tremendous needs that this fire department has. Our facilities are 60, 80 years old. That facility that you're referring to our Station 13, our Broadway Public Safety Station, is an example of what a modern facility should include. Firehouses are more than just buildings with garages in them to put firetrucks in them. There's all kinds of issues when you build these brand new stations that are required didn't exist 60 years ago when some of our older stations were built.

For example, diesel exhaust has been shown to cause cancer. Our fire clothes when we bring it back have cancer stuff from the fires on it. And there's clean rooms where we can get those things clean. There's temperature sensitive rooms that prevent that stuff from getting up in the HVAC ducts and getting spread throughout the entire firehouse.

All of these things are things that modern station has that an older station doesn't. 

Matt Peiken: And you can't retrofit older stations with this equipment? 

AFD Chief Michael Cayse: No, this city has looked at the ability to retrofit, and to do that, you really are starting from scratch. You can't change where the HVAC ducts are, you can't add specific rooms in there, so it is a total rebuild is what is required.

Matt Peiken: We've got such financial pressures in this city. Do you think that this is going to be an ever present need, that just given the priorities in this city, That okay, we're just gonna have to wait in line. 

AFD Chief Michael Cayse: We do have a lot of financial Concerns in this city and the city is aware of that. They recognize the fact that there's a need for capital improvement in the city. They're looking at placing a geo bond on the ballot in november to help with that and they're also looking at other ways that we can Make our facilities better for our firefighters.

Matt Peiken: So other than the broadway station, are there any others in the city that represent where we need to be? Or is that really the lone model of what a contemporary fire station looks like? 

AFD Chief Michael Cayse: I think that by far is the one that meets the current standards that are out there for building fire houses. There are other ones that have been either remodeled or built in the not too distant past but they are not to the standards that exist today. 

Matt Peiken: There's a building on North Merrimon that was a fire station that's been boarded up ever since I've been here for seven years. Is that still under the fire department purview or is that building, do you know which building I'm talking about?

I do, yes. What's going on with that building?

AFD Chief Michael Cayse: I think if I'm not mistaken, that was the old station 4, I think is what it was called. That station is still owned by the city. It is not functionable as an active firehouse. If you pull out of that old station you're talking about, it's only a few blocks from that station 13, the brand new one they had.

We looked at making station 4 and redoing it to try to make it beat, but as I was saying earlier, all the standards that exist for modern firehouses, there was no way to make that a cost efficient thing for the public to afford. 

Matt Peiken: Are there other former fire stations that are now just sitting empty in this city?

AFD Chief Michael Cayse: I don't know of any offhand that are sitting empty that have not been used. 

Matt Peiken: No. Okay. Yeah. Kelly's not shaking her head No, so so what else have we not talked about that you think the public needs to understand either about your role or about the needs of this department? 

AFD Chief Michael Cayse: I think first off, I think the public should understand how good a fire department this is. Coming from another part of the country, coming from another type of fire department as a whole, when I came here, I was so amazed by the absolute capabilities and training levels and desire of these firefighters. It far exceeded what my experiences were in other organizations. And so they have a very good fire department here. So I think the issues like any fire department across the country, all of our issues are the same.

Financially, we can do so much more if we had more funding, right? But we also understand we're one cog in the wheel of the city of all the city government. We have to fund our police department. We have to fund our parks department. We have to fund, housing. We have to do all these things.

So while I say if you give me more funding, I can guarantee I can do more for this city, but I also understand that it's spread between every department in the city. 

Matt Peiken: Yeah, is part of your role as chief to also be the chief lobbyist for the department, going before city council and making the case, is that part of this?

AFD Chief Michael Cayse: Absolutely. Every chance I get, I advocate for what this fire department can do. And every Monday, we have city department director meetings where I hear the issues that are occurring in the other departments, and wherever we can help, we do. And a good example of that is our emergency management program.

We helped the other departments in the city do continuity of operations plans. So if they were to lose significant vehicles or significant buildings, we helped them build the plan on how they can continue to provide city services. So all of us work together to help each other. 

Matt Peiken: Last thing I want to ask you is, you've only been here now, like six plus months. Do you miss a Skyline and Graeter's? 

AFD Chief Michael Cayse: I love me some skyline. Every time family comes down here, they bring me some skyline so that I can make it. I have not yet made it for our firefighters. I need to make it so they can see what that is. 

Matt Peiken: You can make a skyline chili? 

AFD Chief Michael Cayse: Yes. Really? So I'll do that for our firefighters soon.

Matt Peiken: To me, it's an acquired taste. I never quite understood why it was chili. It doesn't, it seems like runny. Yes. Meat sauce. Almost like soup. Exactly. Yes. But I guess if you've been in Cincinnati that long, it's in your blood. 

Yeah. It's the only thing, yeah. I miss it. Actually, I'm going back in July and I'll go back to, and one of my first stops will be Skyline Chili.