During the Sedona Fire District Governing Board Meeting on Tuesday, Dec. 17, Diana Christensen and Lance Waldrop were sworn in as new members, succeeding Janet Jablow and former Chairman Dave Soto.

The SFD Governing Board is a public body that approves the district’s budget, levies taxes, establishes policies and hires and supervises the fire chief, currently Ed Mezulis, who handles day-to-day operations and manages the SFD staff.

• Christensen was deputy director of San Francisco Animal Care and Control for three years and the director of investigations for the Human Services Agency for 15 years.

“I’ve been interested for decades in fire and fire that’s related to climate change,” Christensen said. “I took my kids for years to a family camp [Oakland Feather River Camp] in Quincy [Calif.], and we stopped every year for one or two days in Paradise, Calif. I went up there and worked at the Emergency Operations Center while the fire was going [in 2018]. My employer at the time was the city of San Francisco, and I had done the training to staff those kinds of operations. So it has an emotional meaning to me to keep our communities safe.”

“Animals are critical in these situations, because people won’t leave the fire at the danger of a fire if they can’t get to their animals at times,” Christensen said. “So whenever you have these big kinds of events, you have to figure out a place to put the animals.”

An avid pickleball player, Christensen relocated to Sedona in 2020 with her wife Liz Harris, Ph.D., a sociology professor at Arizona State University.

“It’s a good combination for me of my interests and skills and belief system that we all need to roll our sleeves up and work to the betterment of our communities,” Christensen said, and added that her short-term goal would be to get oriented to the board. “We have an incredible fire chief here. And work on planning a new fire station.”

“My long-term goals are to work on the efforts that will keep us safer, [and] keeping the organization in good shape to be able to respond adequately to the emergencies that we have,” Christensen said.

• Unable to afford college and finding limited job opportunities in his hometown of West Monroe, La.,

Waldrop said he entered the Navy from 1998 until 2002 intending to become an auto mechanic but instead becoming a cryptanalyst.

“It led me down a very fascinating career path. It opened up so many doors; the training was very long and extensive,” Waldrop said. “My career carried me all over the United States, one ship, and then ultimately,  to Washington, D.C., and ultimately, I didn’t want to continue my career after 9/11.”

After leaving active duty, Waldrop became a civil servant with the Department of Defense as an auto mechanic until his retirement in 2011, in which role he attributed his success as a diagnostician to his cryptographic experience.

Waldrop said he met his wife Diane Kase on a dating website in 2009.

“At the time, I was in a deployment situation on an island in the Pacific Ocean,” Waldrop said. “Whenever I fly back into San Diego on off time, it was just impossible to get to know anybody, because [I] immediately had to go back out to this remote location … But we reached out to each other and went on a date, and everything just fell into place. She’s an amazing person. We’re very well matched to each other.” Waldrop relocated to Sedona in 2017 from the Atlanta area.

“I had a moral obligation to not just sit at home, that I had a moral obligation to the city that I love, and these people that have cared so much for me, and so here I am,” Waldrop said.

Waldrop credited Soto and Sedona Police Department Chief Stephanie Foley with giving him a drive to help the community. “I just started to go out and try my best

to meet people in the community,” Waldrop said. “So in the beginning [I went] to SPD to do a ride-along, because this is a paramilitary organization and thought maybe there’s some common ground given my background … I made some incredible friendships, and eventually I did the Citizens Police Academy. It was another step in trying to get out of this house and get involved in the community.”

Waldrop can frequently be seen on area trails and at Sedona City Hall.

“I didn’t realize how blessed Diane and I are to have found the house we did in Sedona right before the property values just exploded into the ionosphere,” Waldrop said. “It finally hit home with me that if I did not do what I needed to do to be a part of my community, then that was morally unacceptable for me.”