“Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.”
Louis D. Brandeis, Other People's Money (1914)
A recent opinion in this newspaper urged Tyler County to “leave our fire departments alone” and questioned why county officials would consider standards, background checks, and additional oversight for volunteer fire departments.
I understand the concern. I served proudly as a volunteer firefighter in Tyler County for almost a decade. I know what it means to leave Thanksgiving dinner, leave your family, or get out of bed in the middle of the night because somebody you have never met needs help. Our volunteers deserve gratitude, but gratitude should not require us to abandon accountability.
The proposed county policy, not a new law, is not perfect. In its current form, it needs revision, additional legal review, and meaningful input from the departments that will be affected by it. I do not support a policy that could leave an entire department unavailable for mutual aid because of the actions or status of one member. We live in a rural county where manpower is already limited. A policy intended to improve public safety should never make an emergency response less safe.
But problems with the wording of a policy do not make its underlying purpose wrong. The intent behind it is sound.
I have heard the question asked repeatedly: Why should we distrust our volunteer fire departments?
That is the wrong question.
Background checks, minimum training requirements, and written standards are not accusations of dishonesty. Banks have audits without accusing every teller of theft. Schools conduct background checks without accusing every teacher of being dangerous. Businesses establish safety procedures without assuming every employee is reckless.
Standards exist because responsible organizations do not wait for something to go wrong before deciding what their standards should have been.
I learned that firsthand.
During my years in a local volunteer department, we generally met twice each month. One meeting handled department business. The other was supposed to be dedicated to training.
Meaningful training was often limited. I repeatedly asked for more of it. On some occasions, hands-on training amounted to lighting a burn barrel, extinguishing it, and calling the exercise complete. Other training nights consisted primarily of watching instructional videos. No, I didn’t want kick-in doors and play Stephen “Bull” McCaffrey from Backdraft rescuing citizens from a high-rise. I wanted basic training to support our department and community.
Eventually, after years of asking, I was allowed to attend outside training in Livingston. It was useful, practical, and exactly the kind of instruction I had been asking for.
During another meeting, while our bylaws were being revised, I suggested adding mandatory basic safety and training standards along with a regular training calendar. Resistance was immediate and came from nearly the entire department. At one point, the chief became so angry that he repeatedly struck the table with his fists and shouted that I was trying to change too much about the department.
That was my experience. I do not claim that every department in Tyler County operates that way. Many firefighters and departments take training and professionalism extremely seriously. But my experience taught me something important: when standards are entirely voluntary, sometimes the organizations that need them most are the organizations least interested in adopting them.
That brings us to background checks.
I believe in second chances. A felony conviction should not necessarily mean that a person can never again contribute to their community. People serve their sentences. People change. Circumstances matter. The nature of an offense matters. How long ago it happened matters. Rehabilitation matters.
But a second chance is not the same thing as an exemption from scrutiny.
A background check does not have to mean automatic disqualification. It means somebody looks at the circumstances and makes an informed decision before placing that person in a position of public trust.
For my family, this is not theoretical.
In 2021, both of my sons were junior firefighters. One was 16 years old at the time. An adult male member of our department, approximately 50 years old, who holds a leadership position and is currently listed on the Texas Sex Offender Registry, communicated with my son through text messages in a manner that my family, along with others who were shown the messages, considered inappropriate and deeply uncomfortable. Those messages have been preserved and turned over to appropriate officials for review.
Some readers may reasonably ask: Why would you continue serving alongside someone with that history, or allow your sons to participate in the same organization?
It is a fair question. The answer is the same principle I have already stated: second chances, rehabilitation, and time. I did not believe that a decades-old conviction, by itself, should automatically define a person forever.
But a second chance carries an expectation that trust will be honored.
I am not asking readers to decide from an opinion column whether those communications violated criminal law. That is for the appropriate authorities to determine. I am not publishing the messages here and asking the public to judge them either.
What I am asking is whether a system without clear standards, oversight, and accountability has any reliable way to recognize when trust is being honored and when warning signs are being missed.
So here is the simpler question:
Should an organization entrusted with entering our homes, interacting with our children, and representing public safety know the backgrounds of the people it puts in those positions?
I believe the answer is yes.
I have heard some respond, in effect, “I don't care who shows up, as long as someone comes.” I understand the emotion behind that statement. When your home is burning, you want help.
But public safety cannot operate on the assumption that the only qualification that matters is showing up.
Whatever anyone's personal opinion may be about an individual's past conviction, the larger policy question remains: What standards should apply when someone with that history is placed not only in a position of public trust, but in leadership?
Volunteer firefighters do not respond only to brush fires in the middle of nowhere. They enter homes. They respond to automobile accidents involving children. They work around vulnerable people during some of the worst moments of their lives.
And they respond to schools.
Texas law requires a person subject to sex-offender registration who enters school premises during standard operating hours to immediately notify the school's administrative office of both their presence and registration status, unless a statutory exception applies. The school may also provide a chaperone while that person is on the premises.
Now picture a structure fire at a school while classes are in session. Children are being evacuated. Teachers and administrators are trying to account for students. Firefighters are moving onto the campus.
If one of those firefighters is subject to registration-related requirements, who knows that responder's status? Who ensures the school has the information it is legally entitled to receive? Does the school assign someone to accompany that individual? Who handles those responsibilities while everyone else is managing an emergency?
This is not an argument that a registered person can never serve in any capacity. It is an argument for having a plan, knowing who is serving, and making sure someone is accountable.
Pretending the issue does not exist because the firefighter is a volunteer protects no one.
I am aware of at least three Tyler County volunteer fire departments that, at one time or another, have had members listed on the sex-offender registry. This is not only a matter of history. At least one department currently has a registered sex offender serving in a leadership position.
I do not offer that as an accusation, nor do I believe a decades-old conviction should automatically disqualify someone from serving. But my own experience has convinced me that the age of a conviction should not make it irrelevant when new concerns arise. A second chance deserves to be respected, but it should not require everyone else to ignore later conduct that may bear on judgment, boundaries, or fitness for leadership.
That is the policy question in front of us: what standards, safeguards and accountability should exist when past history and present concerns intersect in a public-safety leadership role?
That does not make any of those departments bad departments.
It means we need a standard.
There are legitimate criticisms of the proposed policy. If the county expects departments to conduct background checks and document compliance, then the county should help make compliance practical. Centralize the background-check process. Help pay for it. Give departments reasonable deadlines. Establish an appeals or case-by-case review process. Distinguish offenses that have little or nothing to do with present public-safety concerns from offenses that should legitimately raise serious questions.
The answer to an unfunded mandate is not no standards. The better answer is a funded, workable standard.
Access to county resources also means more than money or equipment. Emergency response depends on communications, dispatch coordination, interoperability, mutual aid, and public infrastructure. When an organization participates in a countywide emergency-response system, it is reasonable for the public to expect minimum standards from the people participating in that system.
Those standards should be reasonable and legally sound. They should not punish an entire department because of one person's circumstances, and they should be developed with firefighters at the table.
But they should exist.
Volunteer firefighters do extraordinary work in Tyler County. Nothing in this discussion diminishes that. I believe the opposite. The volunteers who train, serve honorably, and protect their neighbors deserve to know that the person standing beside them has been held to the same basic expectations.
Trust is important.
But trust is not built by refusing to ask questions.
Trust is built by being willing to answer them.
