BATON ROUGE — The Baton Rouge Municipal Fire & Police Civil Service Board has taken a contentious first step toward a possible merger of EMS with the city’s fire department by changing the job description of the Baton Rouge Fire Chief, a position currently held by Mike Kimble.
The board voted unanimously to give the fire chief authority over the EMS division. This follows a temporary restraining order issued August 20, 2025, against Chief Kimble and the board. However, the order against the board was dissolved on August 25, allowing members to move forward with the vote.
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State Examiner Adrienne Bordelon said this classification change is necessary to even consider combining the departments.
“Without this board changing the classification for what the job duties are, to include duties of an EMS division, then the chief would not be able to have those duties and therefore creating an EMS division within the fire department becomes a little more problematic,” said Bordelon.
Mayor-President Sid Edwards’s Chief of Staff, Lon Vicknair, echoed that point, telling the board the change was a first step. “We’re asking to possibly expand the scope of the chief’s responsibility to have an EMS division under the fire department at some point in the future,” he said.
Vicknair added that studies and investigations into whether the merger should happen are still ongoing.
“Our commitment was to make sure this process would be thorough from top to bottom to make sure that we don’t do anything inadvertently to cause services for the city-parish or the EMS employees to be negatively effected,” Vicknair said. “So that’s why we’re doing this in a slow, metathetical process so this is the first domino of yes we can expand the scope of the fire chief. Then we look at what positions would we need underneath that and build that as we go so that would be asked in the future in the process of a potential ….we’re using the word merger but it is a potential growth of EMS underneath the fire department.”
Board Member Joshua Newville brought up many of the fears EMS employees are concerned with over the potential merger.
Board member Joshua Newville raised concerns shared by EMS employees. While the mayor’s office, state examiner, and fire department were represented at the meeting, Janice Willard, president of the EMS Association. She highlighted that the police and fire departments are represented on the civil service board, but there is not an EMS representative for them.
“There is no one up here speaking for us,” she said. She argued that the move is premature and that there are too many uknowns about the future of their current jobs.
“We’re already protected. We’ve already made it through our probationary period. We have to take a test for another probationary period. What if we have employees that don’t pass that test?” Willard asked. “What if we have employees that don’t meet the minimum requirements for the job they’re holding? We’ve been told no one is going to lose their job but we’ve never been told that no one is going to lose their position.”
Willard also gave examples of where similar mergers did not work.
“I can give you examples from all over the country where merging EMS and fire is not successful. New York would be a great example. They’re actually trying to move to take EMS away from fire because it’s been such a dismal failure. That speaks volumes,” Willard said, adding that EMS employees do not believe it’s cost effective or saving money and that they all share these concerns.
Chief Kimble was asked whether adding 150–200 EMS staff would burden the fire department.
“What this does for the Baton Rouge Fire Department is make us stronger by the number and also, bringing in a different branch to build on the City of Baton Rouge & East Baton Rouge Parish of bringing on these highly qualified medics to join in with the Baton Rouge Fire Department provide the Class 1 service that we already do with their accreditation, it puts two top notch departments together operating under one unified command,” said Kimble.
Kimble stressed that the merger would not require firefighters to become medics or medics to become firefighters, but would create opportunities for advancement within each role.
The legal battle over the proposed merger will continue August 27 in 19th Judicial District Court, where a judge has temporarily halted further action. All parties are expected to present their arguments before Judge Johnson.
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