The Sedona Fire District Governing Board elected Helen McNeal as its new chairwoman on June 18, following Dave Soto’s decision not to seek reelection in November. McNeal took over the role on July 9. Board member Corrie Cooperman will serve as the board clerk in McNeal’s stead.
“The main reason [is] I’ve been there nine years, and I’ve enjoyed every minute of every day there,” Soto said in a previous interview. “Thirty five years with Los Angeles City Fire Department, retired, and it’s in my blood being in the fire service … But [there] just comes a point in time when it’s time for some fresh faces and new ideas.”
“I’ve had the opportunity to see his leadership in action and I have great respect for Dave,” McNeal said. “What is so generous [about] him is that he elected to step back from the chair role while he was still on the board so that if I or any of the rest of the board needed his wisdom, he would be there for us.”
McNeal was the founding executive director of California State University’s Shiley Haynes
Institute for Palliative Care from 2012 to 2017 after working as vice president of San Diego Hospice and the Institute for Palliative Medicine, national director of training and development for the American Diabetes Association and president and co-founder of Bridgepoint: The Centre for Human Resource Development. She relocated to Sedona in 2018 after purchasing a home in the city in 2005.
“The Sedona Fire District serves the people of the district, as their first responders, endeavoring to help them in times of need,” McNeal said. “In palliative care our goal was to help people who had serious illness, to have maximum quality of life … The two are very close because palliative care professionals are not first responders. They are often the ones that get the phone call in the middle of the night that someone is ill and needs help, similarly to the way someone calls a fire department when they need assistance. Both are about serving people who have an urgent need.”
In 2009, the year before McNeal met her future husband, he had a major heart attack “that many people don’t survive” that she said was mitigated by a swift response from SFD. Her home in San Diego was also saved from a fire by the San Marcos Fire District.
“I love Washington, D.C. I grew up first in D.C. My father was an admiral and I was a late arrival to the family,” McNeal said. “We lived in Norfolk, Va., for a couple of years and then moved in the Middle East in Bahrain [in 1957], as well while my dad had command there, and then came back to Washington, and he served at the Pentagon. And I went to school there and stayed there until I left to go to the University of Michigan … My mom was a thesis short of a Ph.D. in social work, and at the same time, worked in the Department of the Navy overseeing the building of ships in World War Two, and then in the Bureau of Personnel [overseeing Navy staffing].”
McNeal also makes fused glass ornamental pieces in her spare time. “My glass tends to be fairly bright and colorful,” she said.
She said she was excited about the district’s creation of peer support for firefighters.
“Many people don’t realize that, I’ll call it wear and tear, but it’s emotional, psychological, as well as physical wear and tear on our firefighters, and we have built a strong peer support network, we now have strong mental health resources that are available to them,” McNeal said.
“The most important priority is making sure that our firefighters have what they need, that our stations are in tip-top shape,” McNeal said. “There’s conversations about the need to replace Station 4, but the priority is how do we make sure that we have what we need to serve the citizens of the Sedona Fire District.”
McNeal said that she thinks the district’s main challenges are recruitment and retention and the rising cost of equipment.
“I enjoy working with [McNeal] and she definitely has the community at the forefront,” SFD Risk Reduction Division Chief Dori Booth said. “She has the unique balance of ensuring that the community’s wellbeing is being looked at in any decisions.”
SFD Governing Board member Janet Jablow has chosen to not seek another term, and Diana Christensen and Lance Waldrop have filed petitions to run for the board’s two open seats in the November election.
