East Hampton Village Hires Emergency Services Veteran as First Administrator for Fire and Ambulance Departments

Managing the mountainous paperwork and nonstop logistical duties of running municipal fire and ambulance departments has grown so onerous that East Hampton Village this past week resolved to hire a $165,000-a-year administrator to oversee its emergency services.

The Village Board on Friday, May 19, unanimously appointed Gerard Turza Jr. to the newly created role of fire and emergency medical services administrator. The job, the village has said, is needed to ease the administrative burdens on the volunteer chiefs of the fire and ambulance companies as the amount of paperwork required by their jobs has mounted steadily, making it harder to recruit volunteers to take on leadership posts.

“When Gerry was the chief, he was a fantastic administrator, but you have a lot of volunteers who just don’t want to be chiefs because of all the paperwork it involves now,” Village Administrator Marcos Baladron said. “This lets the firemen fight fires and lets someone who is great at the administrative stuff handle the paperwork.”

Baladron nodded to the cataloging and assessment of the East Hampton Fire Department’s fleet of vehicles and shepherding through an overhaul that included the purchase of more than $4 million worth of new fire trucks that will begin arriving in the village this summer, and credited Turza’s work with saving the village millions of dollars on the purchases.

Turza is a veteran of the village’s emergency services. He has been a member of the East Hampton Fire Department for more than 20 years and was its chief from 2017 to 2021, and was an assistant chief in the Bridgehampton Fire Department previously. He has also worked in the East Hampton Village Police Department’s dispatching center for 28 years, and was the department’s supervisor for more than a decade.

He will assume his new role on June 1.

Turza said that he had first discussed the need for an administrative overseer for the fire department with village officials in 2021, as he was getting ready to step down as the department’s chief — a role he’d already held for a full term longer than has traditionally been the pattern in the department.

“As someone who has been on the inside and seen the dramatic changes over the last 30 years, I can tell you, the job requirements have changed so much — it’s become so paperwork intensive, you can spend six to 10 hours a week on paperwork if you are a chief,” Turza said. “My job will be handling all that less glamorous stuff behind the scenes.”

Now the village has created a new Emergency Medical Services Department, formalizing its takeover of the East Hampton Village Ambulance from the East Hampton Village Ambulance Association — a transition of control that was met with protest from many of the ambulance corps’ volunteers and the resignation of at least a dozen volunteers. The village has filled gaps by boosting the hiring of paid EMTs and paramedics, adding to the juggling of duties the ambulance company’s chiefs will have to manage.

Turza said he has spoken to the chiefs of both the fire and ambulance departments and said they support the new administrative management position. Fire Chief Duane Forrester, Turza’s successor at the head of the fire department, has been particularly eager to hand off some of the clerical load.

“He doesn’t much like the paperwork side of things,” Turza said. “But if Main Street is on fire, he is the guy you want in charge.”