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A MATTER OF STYLE

Fairdale is a community of approximately 250,000 people. The city is known for its excellent public services. Fairdale especially is proud of its police and fire departments. The departments consistently are rated among the best in the state.

For many years Fairdale used the State Police and Fire Academy to train its new law enforcement officers and firefighters. The city paid the state tuition for each trainee that it sent to the academy. Recently, the Fairdale police and fire chiefs started complaining about the level of training their new recruits were receiving at the state academy. The chiefs argued that due to frequent state budget cuts the academy now provided only a basic level of training that was not adequate to meet the high public safety standards that Fairdale’s citizens had come to expect. The chiefs suggested that the city should build and operate its own training academy.

The Fairdale City Council was not opposed to the idea of the city building its own public safety training academy but was concerned about how to pay for the ongoing operations of such a facility. Fairdale’s chief of police and fire chief worked with their counterparts from throughout the region and had them agree to send their new recruits to the Fairdale Public Safety Academy once it was operational. The neighboring communities would pay the City of Fairdale a greater rate of tuition than they had been paying the state in return for a higher level of training. The tuitions paid by the neighboring communities combined with the money that Fairdale would save by not sending its own recruits to the state academy would more than offset the cost of running the public safety training facility. Encouraged by the prospect of a self-supporting public safety training academy, the council approved the sale of several million dollars in municipal bonds to finance the construction of the new facility. The council also instructed the chief of police and the fire chief to work with an architect to design the new facility. The design phase of the project was to take three months. The chiefs then would present their plan to the city manager and she would advertise for bids to construct the project.

The chief of police and the fire chief were delighted about the decision of the city council to build a training academy. For the first few weeks after the council’s decision the chiefs worked together on the design of the facility and the two departments were held up as a model of cooperation for other city departments. Unfortunately, the era of good will did not last long. The chief of police and the fire chief arrived at an impasse over the advanced training wing of the academy. The chief of police wanted the advanced training wing designed to facilitate anti-terrorism training. The fire chief wanted the wing designed to facilitate training for natural disaster mitigation and recovery. The battle between the two chiefs became very acrimonious and public. The chiefs were more than willing to talk to the local media outlets and criticize one another. The deadline for the completion of the design phase of the project was approaching and the conflict had become an embarrassment to the City of Fairdale. The Fairdale City Council instructed the city manager to resolve the conflict and complete the design phase on time. The council members gave the city manager a wide degree of latitude on how she could solve the dilemma.