County Manager said Santa Fe County ran an employee training program this past summer that offered up to 19 hours of paid administrative leave for county employees who chose to attend exterior operations training.

The program, created by the county manager in conjunction with Chief Black of the county fire service, scheduled trainings on Friday afternoons through the summer. "What we did was to offer up to 19 hours of paid administrative leave for county employees who were interested in going through the exterior operations training program," the county manager said.

The nut graf: the program aimed to reduce barriers to volunteering and introduce county employees to roles in the fire service so they might continue training and increase local emergency response capacity. The county manager said the initial training is "about 20 hours," and that the paid leave was intended to prevent employees from having to use personal time to participate.

According to the county manager, exterior operations training covered incident rehabilitation, air truck operations and water tenders. The county manager described multiple pathways volunteers could pursue after the introductory course, including wildland fire certification, interior firefighting and emergency medical services at levels from EMT-basic up to paramedic. "You can become wildland certified so that you can fight wildland fires. You can become certified as a volunteer to do interior firefighting," the county manager said.

The county manager framed the program as both workforce development and recruitment: lowering the initial time and financial barrier so employees could explore volunteering without taking additional time away from their lives. "We wanted to make it so that folks were able to participate, without taking additional time away from their lives," the county manager said.

The county manager also said they participated personally to "lead by example" when asking employees to volunteer. No formal vote or ordinance was recorded in the transcript regarding the program; the remarks describe an existing county employment program rather than a newly passed policy.

Less critical details: training sessions were held on Friday afternoons through the summer; specific participant counts, cost estimates, and whether the program will repeat or expand were not specified in the transcript.