Rick Balentine retired from the Aspen Fire Protection District on Aug. 1 after serving for 36 years with the department and as fire chief since 2014.
During his tenure, he oversaw a transition from a department of volunteer firefighters to one with dozens of full-time staff. He also helped add 20 units of employee housing, secured health insurance for volunteers and was the first customer of Pano AI, a company that designs cameras to help detect wildland fires.
Balentine spoke with Aspen Public Radio’s Michael Fanelli to reflect on his tenure.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Michael Fanelli: You've been with the department for 36 years. How has the Aspen area changed in that time, and the fire department along with it?
Rick Balentine: It's changed quite a bit from when I first came on as a rookie. Although it was a great department then, and it's still a great department now, it's just different. There’s different ways we've progressed over the last 36 years. We were primarily an all-volunteer force since 1881, which is a long history of volunteerism. Really what happened is our call volume got to be so extreme. It kept going up, and up and up. The volunteers — it was very difficult to keep up with all the calls we were getting. So in order to maintain the level of service that the community expects and is, quite frankly, entitled to, we had to put in some career staff.
MF: I know you helped get these AI fire cameras set up. I think maybe those were the first in the nation. Can you just talk about why those are so innovative and how effective they are?
RB: Yeah, that was something that we started in 2021. The Pano AI cameras had never been deployed before. They came to us after a phone call I made to them trying to find some ways of hopefully helping insurance rates in our area, even back then. But we were the first to partner with them, through a collaboration with a funder — a guy named Jerry Hosier, who funded the first year for the pilot program. And since then, it's proved to be very successful. It picks up smoke in early stages, so that we can execute resources out to the fires quicker. Now, Pano AI cameras, there’s probably close to 200 of them in the state already.
MF: Oh, wow, so they've spread.
RB: They've caught on big time. We started with four cameras in our Aspen Fire Protection District, and now there's probably 10 or 11 in our valley alone.
MF: And those have been helpful in responding?
RB: Quite helpful. Not just for early detection of smoke, but we are able to jump on a camera from a computer or an iPhone and actually see what the fire really looks like in real time, whether it's what color the smoke is, how serious it might be. We can get resources there and others coming early on and in the early stages of when it's going to really make a difference.
MF: You mentioned insurance. I wanted to ask about that — another focus of yours. Can you talk about what you tried to do to help the insurance challenge?
RB: Absolutely, it's something I'm very passionate about as well. This is something I've been working on with a couple of us for the last several years. In June, we hosted a wildfire insurance summit at the Aspen Institute where we brought in multiple insurance executives from all over the country, even from London, to get together in a room and talk about what can we really do here in our area to move the needle? So we're putting together a task force of people from the insurance industry and others, to really come together to come up with solutions that can really make a difference, we hope, in our community. Basically, it's a way of gathering data — information that insurance companies can easily get to without a lot of problems that can be trusted.
MF: So what is the goal of that project?
RB: We're in right now — and it's not just here in Aspen and the Roaring Fork Valley — what I call an insurance crisis. People are struggling, people are afraid, people are scared they're going to lose their insurance, and a lot of people can't afford to lose their insurance. One thing we try to get across to insurance companies is this isn't just a town full of millionaires and billionaires. There's a lot of regular people like you and me that live here, that are losing their insurance, or they can't afford their insurance. So the goal of this is to really make a difference — boots on the ground difference — to people that live here in this valley. The question always comes up, “If I do this mitigation, is it really going to make a difference?” Well, that's what this task force is trying to figure out: what really does make a difference? So we could share that with our community and our stakeholders in this valley to really know what they should be doing that's going to make a difference.
MF: You talked a little bit about the Aspen Wildfire Foundation, which I understand you're going to continue working as president of. What is your focus for that moving forward?
RB: The purpose of the Aspen Wildfire Foundation is really, primarily, for wildfire mitigation, education and to some degree response as well — making sure we have the resources we need, making sure the community is really educated on the importance of wildfire mitigation and preparedness. That's what's going to save lives. That's what's going to save properties in our watershed. Fire departments in general, typically they're built for response. They're not built for mitigation. We're trying to change that philosophy so that we can actually be prepared ahead of time, not just to respond to put fires out.
MF: Well, thank you so much for taking the time, Rick. I really appreciate it.
RB: Thank you very much.
