I haven't paid attention to AFD inside stuff since I left 4 years ago, and I have purposefully stayed out of the loop. I retired at least in part to get away from that. But yeah, I think they already had some problem with the way he was doing things. They even alluded to previous problems in their vote announcement, whatever they may be. What are those problems? No idea. Are there valid issues? Maybe, but I dunno what they are. I'm not here defending Chief Baker or saying he's a saint. I'm also not looking to throw him under the bus or have him be used as a scapegoat by the lunatics out there like Charlie fucking Kirk. We just don't know much, and the complaint seems very strange to me given what has to be balanced in decisions to send specialized equipment and personnel (that you don't have much of to begin with) 100 miles away when you're probably going to need it in short order - to tell people to leave.
The only ones I know of who we know tried to get messages to the locals were the NWS, and for whatever reason the locals apparently weren't seeing them. If it's on anyone to try to get Kerrville/Kerr County's shit together 2 days before the storm, it's the State, who Abbott says was already out there. Not Austin. But even if we were to send people out there to get the word out (rather than just trying to communicate with them from here to take the storm seriously and go alert the public on their own), that still could be done with any number of people that aren't specialized personnel who would likely be needed here along with their apparatus, and it likely wouldn't be just AFD people making the trip. I can't make it make sense to send people out there for the purpose of warning the locals, be they officials or the public. IMHO this is probably over something else that was denied. Maybe they have a point. I dunno. I don't like not jumping into the fray to help, 'cause that's what we do. But I also understand that throughout my career the chiefs often had to make tough, sometimes unpopular decisions, that we didn't always understand or have enough info to make an informed judgement over. I need a lot more info before I can pin this on the chief as some sort of terrible disservice.