After going five months without a fire chief since Don Dirks resigned the position in July, Torrance County has a new head of the department.
James Winham was selected from a pool of eight applicants to be the fire chief, leading a department with nine firefighters/emergency medical technicians, three Emergency Medical Service lieutenants, a deputy fire chief and numerous volunteer firefighters.
Winham was offered the job and accepted verbally at the Torrance County commission meeting Dec. 27. He is expected to formally sign his contract soon, said Janice Barela, county manager, and earn $90,000 annually.
Winham, who is currently Banner Healthcare’s western division ambulance director in Wyoming, plans, organizes, coordinates and evaluates the delivery of EMS services in the cities of Casper, Wheatland, Guernsey, Chugwater, and the counties of Natrona and Platte in central and southeast Wyoming.
Before moving into that position, Winham spent more than 35 years with the Emergency Medical Services Authority in Oklahoma, overseeing all of its services as well as managing, monitoring, coordinating and leading the daily operations of the system. He finished his tenure there as the agency’s president and chief operating officer.
In addition to his first-responder agency work, Winham serves as a Captain in the U.S. Army Individual Ready Reserves.
He is the former executive officer for the 120th Medical Company (area support) of the Oklahoma Army National Guard and served as a medic for the Oklahoma Highway Patrol Tactical team and Emergency Medical Services Unit. While living in Oklahoma, he was an adjunct professor at the University of Oklahoma School of Community Medicine and a member of the university’s Special Operations and Medical Oversight team.
Winham has been active in local and national EMS organizations, serving as an Emergency Medical Services Committee member for the Oklahoma State Firefighters Association, elected to the American Ambulance Association’s Ethics Committee, serves as a voting member of the Commission on Accreditation of Ambulance Services Ambulance Remount Safety Committee and is a member of the board of directors and Education Committee for the Academy of International Mobile Healthcare Integration.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in nursing from Oklahoma City University, an associate degree in emergency medical technology from Tulsa Community College and is an Ambulance Service Manager Course graduate.
The pool of candidates, however, lost a qualified candidate because the commission postponed action on allowing the county’s firefighters to participate in the Public Employees Retirement Association of New Mexico retirement benefit plan, claimed Commissioner Samuel Schropp.
Commissioners discussed, then tabled, the issue that would have increased firefighters’ pension benefits from those of other county employees by allowing them PERA access, decreasing the number of years needed to retire.
The move would cost the county less than $63,000 in matching funds and a final decision must be made by March 2024. The firefighters would still need to vote to accept the new plan, so it needs to be presented to them a month earlier.
“We lost a very well-qualified candidate to lead our fire and EMS because we weren’t in a position to offer a firefighter retirement,” Schropp said. “At the last commission meeting, I brought up the firefighting retirement issue, thinking a resolution giving our career firefighters staff and opportunity to vote as required by law would be a no brainer slam dunk.”
The information was available to commissioners for some time prior to the meeting, he said, but commissioners Kevin McCall and Ryan Schwebach voted to delay a vote until they could study the matter further.
“And here we are at the next meeting. And we’re not going to vote on this,” Schropp said. “And this is on a timeline. If we do not pass a resolution allowing the firefighters to start this process before the PERA board meets the next time, this whole process will be kicked down the road until the next board meeting.”