Ozaukee Central fire chief to retire in March

Ozaukee Central Fire Chief  Bill Rice announced Tuesday he is retiring on Friday, March 13.

“This announcement is very bittersweet for me,” Rice said in a letter to the village’s administrative and elected officials. 

Rice noted that he has spent 46 years in the fire service, beginning in 1980 when he became a volunteer firefighter for the Village of Bayside.

“I had a fascination with it and it just seemed like something I wanted to be part of,” Rice said of firefighting in a 2023 interview with Ozaukee Press. 

“I’ve always loved the unpredictability of it. You can go from boring to exciting in no time. No two days are the same. And the feeling of being able to help people when they really need help is hard to describe.”

Rice has been with the Grafton Fire Department since 2008, when he signed up to be a volunteer firefighter.

The bulk of Rice’s career was spent in the City of Wauwatosa, where he rose through the ranks, including 16 years as the chief fire officer. He retired from Wauwatosa after 27 years as the deputy fire chief.

In the summer of 2013, after the Grafton department went from a volunteer corporation to an arm of the village, he became the first full-time fire chief in the community’s history.

When he arrived in Grafton, Rice said, volunteerism was waning in the Grafton Fire Department and other departments throughout Ozaukee County.

“My 13 years in Grafton and later Saukville would focus largely on two things,” he said — preparing the community for the demise of the volunteer and paid-on-call fire and ambulance services and making institutional improvements.

Like other organizations, fire departments have found themselves searching for volunteers as people’s lives become busier.

Rice shepherded the department as it evolved, first serving as chief of both the Grafton and Saukville departments — he was appointed Saukville’s chief in 2020 — as they worked separately but cooperatively and later as they merged into the Ozaukee Central Fire Department.

He also worked to get the communities participating in the department to approve measures to hire additional full-time paramedics. 

“I planned on doing my best to use my experience and knowledge to guide the consolidation for a Jan. 1, 2025, startup and a year of follow up,” Rice wrote in his resignation letter. 

“I have achieved that goal.”

Rice’s role in firefighting has grown beyond the borders of Grafton and Saukville.

In 2009, he was appointed as the first MABAS (Mutual Aid Box Alarm System) Wisconsin regional coordinator, a position he continues to hold today.

In that position, he said, he helps coordinate large fire and emergency incidents throughout Southeastern Wisconsin, from Lake Mills to Milwaukee and Belgium to Kenosha.

He has also spent 22 years as the Milwaukee Area Technical College fire service training certification coordinator and instructor.

But, he said, the most important aspect of his career has been the people he has worked with, particularly in Grafton and Saukville.

“There is no way I would have been able to accomplish what I have done without the tremendous collaboration, support and dedication of so many firefighters, paramedics and EMTs of the Grafton, Saukville and now Ozaukee Central fire departments,” Rice wrote. “It is simply because of them that I have been successful at any level.”

Rice noted that the job of choosing an acting fire chief will be taken up by the Grafton Fire and Police Commission in “the very near future.”