Austin Fire Chief Joel Baker formally retired Thursday after nearly eight years leading the Austin Fire Department, ending a nearly four-decade career in the fire service.<\/p>\n
Baker left Austin City Hall with a Distinguished Service Award and a reminder of the saying that Austin City Manager\u00a0T.C. Broadnax said had become closely associated with the outgoing chief: “Every day is a holiday. Every meal is a banquet. Every payday is a fortune.”<\/p>\n
“There\u2019s a lot of Chief Baker in those words: gratitude, optimism, perspective,\u201d\u00a0Broadnax said, adding that Baker had earned the chance \u201cto enjoy a few more holidays and banquets.\u201d<\/p>\n
Baker said Thursday that the timing was right for him to step away from the fire service. He plans to split his time between Austin and his native Atlanta, ride his motorcycle throughout the country and continue teaching and speaking about fire department leadership.<\/p>\n
“I realized I have more days behind me than I do ahead of me, so it’s just time to get out there and start enjoying life,” Baker told the American-Statesman Thursday.<\/p>\n
Following the ceremony, Austin City Council members unanimously voted to appoint Tom\u00a0Vocke\u00a0as the department’s interim chief effective Sept. 1.<\/p>\n
Vocke, who has served as Baker’s chief of staff for the past year, has spent his entire 29-year career in the fire service in Austin. He will lead the department while the city conducts a nationwide search for a permanent chief. Mosaic Public Partners, which helped the city in its recent city manager and police chief searches, will also help find candidates for the fire chief role.<\/p>\n
“I never imagined I’d be sitting in this seat,”\u00a0Vocke told council members after the vote.<\/p>\n
Baker came to Austin in December 2018 after more than three decades in the Atlanta-area fire service, including serving as Atlanta’s fire chief. He also served as a Marine and spent more than a decade in the Navy Reserve.<\/p>\n
During his Austin tenure, he helped open five new fire stations and led the department through the COVID-19 pandemic and two major winter storms. His final year also included a no-confidence vote from the Austin Firefighters Association stemming from a dispute over the Fire Department’s response to the deadly July 2025 Hill Country floods.<\/p>\n
Baker said one of the biggest challenges he navigated as Austin’s fire chief was the budget pressures the city faced while trying to balance demands for public safety alongside spending on other services.<\/p>\n
“The city needs public safety services, but it needs its parks and resources for people who need housing help, too,” Baker said.<\/p>\n
Vocke said he expects those same financial pressures to follow him into the interim role. He said one of the department\u2019s biggest challenges will be maintaining current levels of service with fewer resources, even as the Fire Department prepares for a major change to its shift schedule for firefighters that\u2019s designed to give personnel more time off between shifts. The department still needs to fill 100 vacant firefighter positions before the new schedule is implemented next October.<\/p>\n
Vocke said that\u2019s a challenge he looks forward to tackling.<\/p>\n
“Our folks are doing everything they can to take care of the community, so we need to make sure we’re doing everything we can to take care of them.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Austin Fire Chief Joel Baker formally retired Thursday after nearly eight years leading the Austin Fire Department, ending…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":420508,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[132,134,133],"class_list":["post-420507","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-austin","tag-austin","tag-austin-headlines","tag-austin-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/420507","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=420507"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/420507\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/420508"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=420507"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=420507"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=420507"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}