The Long Beach Fire Department is facing big issues: homelessness, a younger firefighting force and Downtown high rises popping up like spring flowers. To lead them through it all is Fire Chief Xavier Espino, recently appointed in October.

Espino is a 33-year veteran of the department, climbing the ladder from firefighter to medic to fire captain to battalion chief to assistant chief.

The difference between his first few jobs at the station to his jobs in command are like the difference between a sprint—with instant gratification—and a marathon, he said.

“You’re just chugging away for 26 miles and when you get to that finish line, it feels good, you get that same bump, but you look over your shoulder and you go, ‘Oh yeah, I finished this one, but I started another marathon about mid-way and now I have to finish that one,'” Espino said. “It just doesn’t stop. It is gratifying; it just comes a bit slower.”

That gratification in a job is one of the reasons Espino wanted to become a firefighter. For years he watched his dad, who was a captain for the Los Angeles County Fire Department.

“The fact that he came home pretty much happy every day, had lots of great stories, and the time that I spent in the fire station watching the crews and the way they comported themselves like family was really desirable for me at that point,” Espino said.

After a year in college, Espino decided that’s what he wanted for himself.

Decades later, one of the marathon’s Espino is leading the LBFD through involves all the new development and construction in the city.

“You look at the increase in construction Downtown, which brings vertical density, more people for us means more responses. That’s just the way it is,” he said.

More responses means more of a strain on fire personnel. Recently, the city council’s public safety committee asked Espino and his staff to look at and report back on the possibility of requiring developers of large projects to fund new fire stations through impact fees to help combat this strain.

Rex Pritchard, president of the Long Beach Firefighters Association, echoed the sentiment at the committee’s meeting, pointing out that the city still uses fire stations built as early as the 1930s.

“Station 6 is a mobile home trailer,” Pritchard said. “So as we develop these areas, as we see the booms going up in the Downtown area, the ability to partner with developers to add infrastructure is desperately needed.”

To add to the strain of development, the department has had a huge number of retirements in recent years, Espino said. About 125 of 392 personnel in the department have been hired since 2016.

“In some respects, we’re very young,” Espino said. About a third of the department has less than five years of experience on the job, although it’s fairly normal to see the cycle of retirements and mass hires every decade or so, he said.

As soon as Espino started as chief, the department needed to have a dual academy with two classes of students training simultaneously, trading off days of the week to utilize the training center every day.

“We had gotten to a point where we were severely under resourced in the firefighter, firefighter-paramedic ranks, which meant a very heavy burden for the people we did have,” Espino said.

The academy was a success with high retention and graduation rates, according to the chief.

“That really stopped the bleeding for us,” he said.

Homelessness has also added a strain on the department’s units. In December, the LBFD added a second team of two firefighters for the Homeless Education And Response Team, or HEART, a mobile unit tasked with responding to calls about people experiencing homelessness in order to free up emergency resources for other calls.

Espino said he hopes the department might eventually add a third team so each battalion has one HEART team of its own.

To navigate all these issues, Espino said he and his staff are working on a three-year strategic plan to give them a road map of where the department is headed and the progress they’re making as a whole.

It should answer some key questions:

“Are we adapting with technology? How are we doing in our recruiting efforts to have a diverse workforce—still getting the top candidates—but getting a bit more diversity in both gender and race, and how do we do that?” Espino said.

“And there are a lot of different things that we want to get done, but at a certain point in time you run out of personnel and the ability to respond to everything, so you have to prioritize, line those things up and just starting knocking—marathons, right?”