The Third Lever
Robert Grand · Battalion Chief who still runs calls
For as long as anyone reading this has worn the uniform, an open spot on the morning board has had exactly two answers. You force hire to fill it, or you fight the budget for another position. Force hiring is the fast lever and the expensive one. Hiring is the slow lever and the permanent one. Every staffing conversation in this service, in every kitchen and every budget hearing, has lived inside that box.
We just got a third lever.
The Choice That Never Had a Third Option
Walk it through the way it actually happens. Somebody calls in, or a spot is vacant, and now there’s an open spot on the morning board. You start the callout list. If nobody takes it, somebody gets force hired, held over on mandatory, and now the crew is whole again. That’s the part worth saying plainly: the crew was never short. You kept it full by burning a person to do it, somebody working past the point where the research says they should.
And it’s rarely just the one person. The open spot at 0700 often gets filled by holding the off-going crew, so the price of a single vacancy gets paid by people who already worked all night and were counting on going home. Everybody in this service knows the move. You save the staffing line’s number in your phone so you don’t accidentally pick up on your day off and find out you’re now on the hook for a shift you never volunteered for. That’s not a healthy system. That’s a system quietly running on people’s dread of their own phone. Studies on stacked consecutive hours are not subtle about where it leads: fatigue-fueled mistakes climb the longer people work, and the load hits medics hardest, because a tired body on a fireground is one thing and a tired mind running a code is another (FireRescue1, https://www.firerescue1.com/fire-chief/articles/fire-department-staffing-overtime-vs-hiring-eKhVo5g7HgxNgkT8/).
I can tell you what the far end of that feels like, because I’ve been there. A couple of summers back, before we went to the 24/72, we were short enough that the department opened the medic unit to anybody who’d ride it, battalion chiefs included. I worked my first 48 as a BC, ran a couple of fires, stayed busy the way you do at the busiest time of the year. Then I picked up a 24 on the medic. Busy again. I slept maybe two hours. Then they asked if I’d take a fourth shift on that same medic, and I took it, because I wanted to keep somebody else off a force hire. That shift I slept less than thirty minutes. Add it up and I had five to seven hours of sleep across ninety-six. Somewhere in there you cross a line where nothing matters but getting through. You get short. You get agitated. You start making decisions you wouldn’t make rested, and you can feel it happening and you’re too worn down to stop it. And it didn’t end clean. Instead of the three days off that should have followed, I got one, then went back to another busy tour as a BC. That’s the cost the pay period never shows. It doesn’t reset when the shift ends. It follows you into the next one.
The other lever, hiring, is the one everybody says they want and nobody can move fast enough. Positions take budget cycles. Academies take months. And the whole time the seat is empty, you are back on the first lever, paying overtime and holding people over, which burns out the people you have, which opens more seats. The schedule itself is where a lot of this lives; research on the 24/72 rotation points to real gains in morale, retention, and recovery, with the honest caveat that the overtime cost has to be managed or the whole benefit gets eaten (Frontiers in Environmental Health, https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/environmental-health/articles/10.3389/fenvh.2026.1743492/full). Federal wildland crews are living the far end of the loop right now, reporting rising burnout and sinking morale on exactly this pattern (Federal News Network, https://federalnewsnetwork.com/workforce/2026/06/federal-wildland-firefighters-report-increased-burnout-low-morale/). It is a closed circle, and for a century it stayed closed. Two levers, both with a bill attached, and no way out of the geometry.
What Just Broke the Geometry
The third lever is automation that carries a defined slice of the load without a person in the seat. Not the hard calls, not the judgment work, the routine, high-volume, repetitive layer. New Orleans is the proof it’s real and not a slide deck: a communications district running more than a third short turned part of its motor-vehicle-accident call handling over to an AI that sorts and prioritizes before a human ever picks up (Fox8, https://www.fox8live.com/2026/07/17/when-calling-911-center-new-orleans-ai-may-answer-heres-why/). One agency, one narrow slice, but the thing it demonstrated is the point: coverage came apart from headcount.
That is genuinely new, and it changes the category of the problem. The staffing shortage stops being purely a hiring problem and becomes a design problem: which work gets handed off, which work never leaves a person, and who gets to decide. The lever isn’t limited to a dispatch floor. Anywhere routine load is eating hours that should be going to recovery, the same move is coming. And the part almost nobody is talking about is what you do with the hours it frees.
The Fork Hiding Inside the Relief
A lever that buys back hours sounds like a pure win until you ask a simple question: where do the hours go?
There’s more than one honest answer, and that’s the whole point. One is the budget line, and let’s be straight about it, that’s a legitimate use. A city that can hand real savings back to taxpayers, or move them to another need, is doing its job, and nobody should pretend that’s the wrong answer. Another is recovery, the rest between calls that rising call volume keeps eating. Another is training, the hours that quietly vanish first when a unit runs all day. Those last two aren’t soft uses set against the responsible budget choice. They’re budget choices too, just measured over a longer horizon.
Here’s what gets lost when it’s framed as people versus dollars. A medic who gets recovery is a medic less likely to burn out and walk, and every one who walks costs a small fortune to hire and train back. Crews that keep their training hours make fewer of the mistakes that turn into claims against the city. And the two problems compound: call volume climbs every year, and as it climbs, recovery time shrinks and training hours shrink right along with it, so people get more tired and less sharp at the same time. That intersection, tired and undertrained, is where liability lives, and it is not cheap. Hours put back into rest and training aren’t money the budget spends. They’re money the budget doesn’t lose later, in turnover it never had to eat and claims it never had to defend.
So the real fork isn’t people against money. It’s deciding on purpose against letting it drift. The drift has a name worth knowing before you meet it: governance by vacancy, where nobody actually chooses and the staffing plan quietly gets rewritten by whatever the machine turns out to be able to absorb. The headcount target settles down to match the tool’s capacity, not because anyone weighed the tradeoffs, but because the metrics stopped screaming and the pressure came off. That’s the outcome to avoid. Not because returning savings is wrong, it can be exactly right, but because a decision this big deserves to be made by people weighing all of it, not made by default because nobody was looking.
The One Question That Decides It
So here’s the framework, and it is short, because the honest ones usually are. Picture the three levers as a triangle: overtime, hiring, and now automation. The old game only let you slide between the first two. The new lever doesn’t replace them; it changes what the savings from the third corner are allowed to do. And the whole thing resolves on one question asked at the right time.
Before you deploy anything that buys back hours, decide where those hours go. Out loud. In writing. Where your people can see it.
That’s it. Not after the pilot, not once the savings show up on a spreadsheet and the finance side has already mentally spent them. Before. Because the default, if you don’t decide, is that the savings drift toward whatever’s easiest to book, and that’s rarely the choice you’d have made looking at the whole picture. The leaders who get this right will make the call the way you’d make any doctrine call: on purpose, in advance, with the people it affects in the room. Where there’s a union, that means at the table, because a decision this size holds up better when everyone can see how it was reached.
I’ve been on the staffing side of these calls, and I understand every pull in the room. The pressure to bank a real, visible savings is legitimate, and it comes from people doing right by the budget. The case for putting those hours into recovery and training is legitimate too, and over a few years it usually is the budget case, through the people you keep and the claims you never see. Answering the where-do-the-hours-go question up front is how you weigh both honestly, instead of letting the easiest-to-book answer decide it for you.
Making the Savings Visible
There’s a design principle buried in all of this, and it’s the one I’d hand to anyone building tools for this service. If a tool saves a crew time, it should show its work. It should make plain what it absorbed and what it handed back, so leadership can decide where the recovered hours go instead of guessing. A tool that quietly enables a lower headcount without ever surfacing that it’s doing so isn’t relief. It’s a liability wearing relief’s uniform, and the department won’t feel it until retention craters and nobody can point to the shift where it started.
Legibility is the whole ballgame. The tools worth adopting are the ones that put the tradeoff on the table and hand the decision to a human. The ones to be careful with are the ones that make the decision for you by staying silent about it.
The Decision Is Yours, Not the Vendor’s
The overtime-and-hiring box held for a century because the math was fixed. It isn’t fixed anymore. A department can hand off a defined slice of the routine load, and that is a real gift, the first new option this service has had on staffing in a very long time.
But a lever is only as good as the hand on it. The tool doesn’t decide whether the hours it saves go to recovery, to training, back to the budget, or quietly to a lower headcount nobody chose. People decide that, weighing all of it, or they let it get decided by default, which is the same thing arriving as a surprise two years later. The staffing shortage may finally have a third answer. Whether that answer heals the model or just hides its cracks was never going to be up to the machine.
Robert Grand is a Battalion Chief at Eugene Springfield Fire with 24 years of service. He writes Frontline Intelligence, a newsletter on operational doctrine, technology, and leadership in Fire & EMS.
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