Garner Fire Department unveils interactive five‑year strategic plan with online story map

Garner — The Garner Fire Rescue leadership on April 21 presented a refreshed five‑year strategic plan built around seven goals and an interactive online story map intended to increase transparency and allow residents and staff to track progress.

Fire Chief Barrett Kenny introduced the effort and praised Deputy Chief Jason Hathcock as the lead staffer on the initiative. Hathcock demonstrated an ArcGIS story map and a linked operations dashboard designed to show quarterly updates on objectives and tasks. "This is a different mechanism to communicate other than the paper version," Hathcock said, adding the tool will include an operations dashboard and a three‑question survey so stakeholders can provide feedback.

Hathcock said the department'9s 2020–2025 plan achieved more than 90% of its objectives and that the new plan centers on operational readiness, workforce readiness, health and safety, communication and consistency, capacity planning, continuous improvement and records optimization. He said the new plan ties 29 objectives to critical tasks and assigns owners, timeframes and metrics to track progress.

Council members asked about recruitment and retention; Hathcock explained a shift to a 48/96 schedule helped expand the recruitment area but introduced challenges with retention and the department is pursuing targeted recruitment and training facility investments to host an academy in the future. Chief Kenny supplied staffing data: "We'9re 81 line staff and we have 8 full‑time administrative staff and 1 supplemental administrative staff," he said.

Council praised the interactive approach and suggested staff prepare a short one‑page summary for public distribution if survey feedback shows the story map is too detailed.

The fire department will post the interactive plan and dashboard on its webpage and use quarterly updates to report progress to council and the public.