Administration
Administration covers the business side of a Fire Officer II's job: budgets, purchasing, records retention, required reports, and written policy. Exam items test whether you can build a defensible budget request, follow procurement rules, and manage records as legal documents.
Budgeting
- Operating funds cover recurring costs (salaries, fuel, supplies); capital funds cover long-life assets (apparatus, stations, major equipment).
- Know the formats: line-item, program, performance, and zero-based; a performance or program budget ties dollars to measurable outcomes.
- The cycle is preparation, adoption, execution, and audit. Your role is to justify with data, monitor account balances, and avoid overspending a line or mischarging across lines.
Purchasing and grants
- Follow thresholds and approval levels; obtain competing quotes or bids as required; never split a purchase to avoid a threshold.
- Grants carry match requirements, deadlines, reporting, and audit liability; read the terms before accepting.
Records and reports
- Retention schedules govern how long records are kept and when destruction is lawful; incident reports are legal records and may be discoverable.
- Release records only through the proper authority; protect investigative, personnel, and medical records.
Policy
An SOP must be written, dated, reviewed, consistent with law, contract, and higher-level policy, and communicated before enforcement.
Worked example
Requesting a replacement engine: present call volume by district, response-time compliance, the reserve unit's out-of-service hours, maintenance cost per mile, and the lifecycle replacement schedule, then tie the request to a performance objective. Reasoning: capital requests compete against other departments, and data plus consequences is stronger than "the truck is old."
Traps
- Mixing capital and operating money.
- Splitting purchases to dodge approval thresholds.
- Writing an SOP that conflicts with the labor agreement.
- Promising records that retention rules require be kept.