Welcome back to season 3 of My Mayor, the Catalyst series that helps you get to know the person behind the policy. We sat down with each candidate and asked them each the same five questions, with a few follow up questions sprinkled in. For Episode 3, we asked:
- What do you collect?
- What’s something you’ve changed your mind about because of a conversation with someone who disagreed with you?
- How do you express your creativity?
- What’s a small moment in your life that ended up having a much bigger impact than you ever expected?
- What’s something that never fails to make you smile?
JOE HAMILTON
And we are back for My Mayor, episode three, with Fire Chief Jim Large. Good to see you again, sir.
JIM LARGE
Good to see you. Good to be here.
JOE HAMILTON
Great. So we’ve got five more questions for you. Are you ready to tackle them?
JIM LARGE
I’m ready.
JOE HAMILTON
Number one — what do you collect?
JIM LARGE
Well, I collect… starting in ’07, 2007. I’ll give you the history of why I started this collection real quick. It was the 100-year anniversary of St. Pete Fire Rescue being a paid professional department, and somebody suggested to me that we needed a commemorative challenge coin. I hadn’t really thought much about challenge coins, but we went ahead and made one. So that was my first one. Since then, I’ve collected challenge coins because the fire department, much like the military, it’s become quite the thing to have your own department challenge coin. In some cases, chiefs have their own challenge coin. And it’s spread to other industries as well. So currently, I have a collection of challenge coins that’s about 110 different coins from all over the country — fire departments, like I said, even some foreign countries. It’s kind of a neat collection. I did have it displayed in my office when I was still on the fire department. One of the firefighters made me a really nice wooden flag holder — the stripes held all the challenge coins, and I had it up in the office. But my wife’s not big on fire memorabilia decorating the house, so the challenge coins are in a nice case now.
JOE HAMILTON
Yeah. I’m buddies with Bill Edwards, and he’s got a heck of a challenge coin collection himself. I think we’re going to make them for the Science Center as well, which I’m excited about. It’d be a cool thing to give away.
JIM LARGE
Yeah, absolutely.
JOE HAMILTON
So what are a couple of your favorites?
JIM LARGE
Well, there’s one that’s really kind of special to me. Lieutenant Steve Hay was a lieutenant of the department — just an outstanding individual. And he actually passed away from COVID. In his memory, they made a special challenge coin just for him and gave them out to all of us. That one probably has the most sentimental attachment to it. Obviously, several of the stations made their own challenge coins and gave them to me, so those have great meaning as well because they come right here from the home front. I have one from the governor’s office a few years back, different military people that I’ve met at MacDill — I think those are cool. But the one that memorializes Steve Hay is front and center in my collection case.
JOE HAMILTON
Makes a lot of sense. Question two — what’s something you’ve changed your mind about because of a conversation with someone who disagreed with you?
JIM LARGE
These questions that you come up with, they’re quite thought-inducing. So, when you’re in a leadership role, this should happen quite a bit, really, if you surround yourself with the right people. We’ve talked about that a little bit before — you don’t want a group of hinge heads around you. You want people that’ll disagree, because you may think you’re right, but you’re not always right. So I thought about this long and hard, because there’s probably a thousand times in the 18 years that I’ve changed my mind. When the staff gets together, it’s six to one sometimes, and you’ve got to look at that and say, “Why am I the only one thinking this and the other six…?” And that’s when you change your mind. But on one of them, I was hanging on to some more traditional views of the fire department when it came to response. I had a push from some of the staff members to make all of our fire engines advanced life support. We already have the standalone rescues that are advanced life support, but they wanted to increase it to do the engines. What that would require is that every rescue was two paramedics. So we were going to take a paramedic off the rescue, put it on the engine, and put the EMT on the engine on the rescue. So it was really a swap — there was no real significant additional cost from a taxpayer point of view, other than we had to get some equipment funded for the ALS engines. Being here so long, I thought, “Fire first, EMS second.” Well, they didn’t give up. They kept pushing, and they brought statistical data that supported the effort. Our engines were going anyway as a BLS unit first-due, and it just made perfect sense to increase our capabilities. So ultimately I said, “I don’t know what I’m arguing against here, because it makes no sense. What they’re proposing makes perfect sense.” So we switched over, and it’s only improved service. 90% of the calls my last year were EMS. We still have to be able to fight fire, but EMS is the main function of today’s fire service.
JOE HAMILTON
Interesting. And obviously, a lot of times when there’s an emergency or a call, you often see two EMS units — I think there are two competing entities that both send — and then you have your fire folks in there too. Can you just, as a 101, explain how that works, how it’s triaged, and why multiple units show up at the scene?
JIM LARGE
Yes. So you get two units minimum. You get an ALS rescue from the fire department, and then you get a Sunstar ambulance. The logic behind it is: we’re the ALS provider of the fire service. They show up, they treat you, they package you, they get you ready to be transported. Sunstar is the transport entity. So once they take the patient and start heading to the hospital, that could be 45 minutes of out-of-service time. Meanwhile, that ALS rescue unit’s back in service ready to take the next call right away. So it’s a much more available service, if you will. It keeps the response times — the goal is five minutes or less anywhere in the city. If you were out of service for 45 minutes, that creates a tremendous domino effect. It creates a hole. Now the next closest unit runs there, and then the next closest unit runs to that hole, and it has a domino effect on service delivery. So it’s a redundant system in a way. People ask that all the time: “Why do I get two trucks? Sometimes three.” The three was more prominent back before we ALS-ed the engines, because if the closest unit was a BLS engine, they came, Sunstar came, and then the ALS rescue came — so you’d have three units. You don’t see that as much now since we ALS, because if the ALS engine goes and Sunstar goes, that’s good enough. You don’t need that third unit. But you do still see two units all the time, and that’s the reason. “Is it a little bit more costly?” I get asked. Yes, it’s a little bit more costly. But when you’re talking about emergency medical service and life-and-death situations, you can’t put a price on it. It’s just a very, very good, strong system.
JOE HAMILTON
Makes sense. So it’s not a competing system — it’s a one-two punch, where the first group, your group, the ALS group, is the one that treats, and then really Sunstar’s meant as transport, which keeps the ALS folks nimble and ready to respond to the next incident.
JIM LARGE
Absolutely. Now, Sunstar does have paramedics that are trained equally and can start treatment before we get there. But in theory, it’s exactly what you described. Not competing at all.
JOE HAMILTON
Supporting. I think I might know the answer to this one based on a previous interview, but — how do you express your creativity?
JIM LARGE
Yeah, this one was interesting, because it really made me think. And yes, recently it’s piano, as we talked about. But I’m not really that creative — I’m trying to learn. I’m not writing any music, and I’m not putting any songs together. But I’ll go back a little bit. I grew up kind of always liking to draw. I did a lot of art when I was younger, and I’ve gotten away from it a little bit in the last… I think kind of since kids came along. But then I started dabbling in poetry, and the type of poetry that I do is not anything romantic — it’s usually satirical a little bit. It always had something to do with the fire department; I did a lot of those. Since I retired, my wife has asked me more than once to write poems for different occasions, or to put into something she was mailing out. So I’ve always done a little bit of that as well. But recently, like I said, piano has taken most of my — if there is any creativity in it, it’s more like just trying to learn this stuff. I would say a little bit of the art — I was big into pen-and-ink drawing for a long time — and then, like I say, the poetry. I try to make it humorous and based on real-life scenarios, like in the fire service. When I was a fire marshal, every year I would hold a Christmas breakfast, and the expectation was that that would be the reading of the annual Christmas poem that I was charged with writing. We had a lot of good times with that. So that would be my three segments of creativity.
JOE HAMILTON
So when I hear “humorous poems,” limericks come to mind, obviously. Are we writing limericks, or do they rhyme? Are they freeform? What’s your style?
JIM LARGE
Oh, no, they have to rhyme. My style — they have to rhyme. They’re not really a limerick; they’re usually several verses.
JOE HAMILTON
I see.
JIM LARGE
And like I say, some of them I patterned after — like on the Christmas poems, I would pattern them like “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas.” And then I would create my own night before Christmas, but make sure that it rhymed and that it had the humorous points about things that actually happened throughout the year that were kind of funny.
JOE HAMILTON
Nice. What’s a small moment in your life that ended up having a much bigger impact than you expected?
JIM LARGE
This one was a tough one, because as I think about moments that had a big impact, they were probably big moments. The birth of my first child just had a tremendous impact on me. And then a few months later, I lost my first parent, and that year was like a roller coaster of impacts. But I tried to think, okay, on a smaller scale — and I had to go back to real early in my career. I was at a very busy fire station, south side of St. Pete. I loved it. We were busy, we had a great crew. And I think I mentioned to you before, my mentor was the district chief there who would take me out on the bench every night. So I had expressed interest in trying to prepare to be an officer someday. And so one night, he called me to come out on the bench, and he said, “You have ambition to be an officer.” I said, “Well, yeah.” This was a kind of controversial time in the fire department — there was a battle going on between the union leadership and City Hall over pay and issues, and I was with a crew that was very outspoken. So he said to me, as he said back then, “Downtown doesn’t really like this crew because they’re so outspoken. You’re not ever going to advance if you stay here.” I said, “I love it here. I’m fine with that.” He said, “No. I’m going to move you. We’re going to give you a transfer.” Now, usually transfers were because of a need — like if you were a driver and there were several drivers at your station and another station had a driver retire or something, they transferred one of the drivers over, or an emergency medical technician, whatever the case may be. Well, there was no real need anywhere, but he said, “I’m sending you to a station where there’s a whole bunch of guys that are studying for lieutenant, and I want you to get to know them.” I was devastated. I didn’t want to move — like I said, I loved the crew I had. But I went to that station, and I was welcomed with really open arms from all these senior guys that had been working hard for years to try to make lieutenant. And we ended up studying together, and then I took my first test, and I made lieutenant. As I mentioned before, I was the youngest lieutenant in the history of the department, at 24. That move — that small move, if you will, a transfer, in the scheme of a whole career in the fire department — probably had more to do with ultimate success, ending up being the fire chief of the department, than any single thing that happened to me. So I think the impact of that is probably one of the smaller things that happened that had a bigger impact, because most of the other things were just big events that had big impact.
JOE HAMILTON
I think there’s a lesson in diplomacy in there, because a lot of times, even if your message is right or just or good, if the way you’re sharing that message is commanding more attention than the message itself, then it can be counterproductive. And oftentimes diplomacy — and sitting with folks that feel differently — is a necessary prerequisite to actually get them to listen and get your points across.
JIM LARGE
Yes, I would say that in that era, diplomacy was not at the forefront. It was a very outspoken time. There were protests at City Hall. There was a lot of stuff going on with negotiations and things between the fire union and the city. It ultimately ended up — we went to a special master, and there was a ruling. I could tell you: I was making 232 biweekly, and we got a humongous raise — we went to 298 biweekly. So that was substantial. That was the end result after going to the special master.
JOE HAMILTON
So say a movement emerges amongst the ranks when you’re fire chief, and people are passionate about it — they feel something’s an injustice or whatever. How do you take that experience you had and that understanding of how things work, and what’s the advice you give them on packaging their concerns in a way that leads to the most optimal outcomes for them?
JIM LARGE
Well, I think for me, I always believed in an open-door policy, and that was a little bit controversial with some — because we didn’t have a history of an open-door policy. We’re quasi-military, so there’s the chain of command, and if you don’t follow the chain of command, that’s just unacceptable. But I felt that if I visited a station and somebody wanted to sit down and tell me their beef, whatever it was, you need to be open to that. You need to listen, but you have to keep it professional. That’s the other part of it — I would tell them, “Listen, I’ll let you complain, I’ll let you disagree or whatever, but just keep it professional and respectful.” And it goes back to what we talked about earlier — when you could change your mind on, say, a policy that everybody disagrees with. You might hear some things that you just haven’t thought about, and you say, “Thanks for telling me that. I will look into that. I might change the policy.” And I know those things have happened. I can’t think of one right off the top of my head, but I know I’ve had discussions over policy decisions and rules-and-reg changes and how they actually affect the people on the street. But the key is, you can have that audience — just keep it civil. And if you have your say but you don’t get the change that you wanted, you have to accept that and move forward. And that goes both directions: “Hey, we talked about it, but a decision has to be made. This is what was made, but thank you, and we’re going to move forward.”
JOE HAMILTON
Makes sense. All right, final question. What’s something that never fails to make you smile?
JIM LARGE
This one is recently. Now, it used to be my kids when they were little — when I’d come home, there’s nothing like it when they all run to you, “Daddy!” And it doesn’t matter how bad a day you had, you smile. But now that they’re all grown and gone, for the most part, I have two things that make me smile, and they’re named Nico and Soto. They’re two Irish soft-coated wheaten terriers, and — same thing. I can have the worst day in the world, I walk in, and they act like I’ve been gone for years, and I could’ve been gone five minutes. You can’t help but smile when you look at them. And I like all animals — I’ve had cats, I’ve had dogs. When I was growing up, my mom was an animal lover; we had every kind of animal you can imagine. Even an iguana one time — a pet iguana, a ferret. But there’s something about a dog, and that unconditional love they give you, that you just can’t help but smile.
JOE HAMILTON
Definitely. Wonderful. Well, I’ve enjoyed the time, and I appreciate you taking your time.
JIM LARGE
Absolutely.
JOE HAMILTON
And I look forward to catching up. I think you’ve got one more episode before the primary, so I look forward to that.
JIM LARGE
Yeah.
JOE HAMILTON
Until then — if you’re going out knocking on doors, I’m going to say a hat or some sunscreen, because you’ve got the tan going. It’s great, it looks great.
JIM LARGE
Well, it’s a little burnt — it’s more burnt than tan, but yeah.
JOE HAMILTON
Yeah.
JIM LARGE
Yeah, so you’re right. It’s just been so hot.
JOE HAMILTON
Yeah.
JIM LARGE
It really has.
JOE HAMILTON
Well—
JIM LARGE
But I’ll just add real quick — it’s been very worthwhile, because we’re having conversations that are just great conversations. Back to what we were saying, I’m hearing things from people that I wouldn’t know if I didn’t knock on their door. So that part’s going really well.
JOE HAMILTON
Awesome. All right. Jim Large, good to see you, and speak again soon.
JIM LARGE
All right, good to see you. Have a great day.