On the night of Oct. 29, the Aurora Fire Department responded to a house fire on Grant Place.
Department leadership gets automatic alerts about confirmed fires at any time of day or night, and so Fire Chief David McCabe started listening to his radio. It didn’t seem to be going well — every time firefighters turned around, there was fire inside another enclosed space of the house — so he drove over, he said.
As he’s walking around the scene, watching for hazards, he felt this “aura of peace” come over him. McCabe said he isn’t really a spiritual guy, it was just that he realized all the stuff he and others in the offices at the department do that’s monotonous and stressful, and all the meetings they sit through, they do it because of this.
“I felt completely at ease watching them work,” McCabe said. “I’m like, ‘We’re in a good place at the fire department.’
“And I decided the next day to submit my retirement papers.”
After a career at the Aurora Fire Department that started in March 1997, McCabe will serve out his last day as fire chief on Wednesday. In his years at the department, McCabe rose through the ranks, starting from being a firefighter and paramedic before moving up to lieutenant, captain, battalion chief, assistant chief of Support Services and deputy chief before being appointed to fire chief in 2022.
Aurora Mayor John Laesch commended McCabe for his 28 years of service, and wished him well in his retirement.
“I appreciate his efforts as the leader of our fire department, as he worked around-the-clock to answer calls, helped the team achieve impeccable response times, oversaw the construction of three fire stations and spearheaded the implementation of new trucks and ambulances throughout the city,” Laesch said.
Although McCabe has been fire chief for the last nearly three-and-a-half years, and in upper department leadership for years before that, he said that he still tells people who ask him what he does that he’s a firefighter, since that’s what he was hired to be. If they ask his rank, then he’ll tell them he’s the chief, but he doesn’t identify as someone who’s “outside of the department,” and he’s never lost that “sense of belonging and vision,” he said.
No one in their 20s takes a fire department test to become fire chief, according to McCabe. He said they take it to fight fires, to help people and to be on the trucks, so it’s a major life change going from that to a Monday-to-Friday job where time is mostly spent in the office.
Different people have different reasons they want to move up in the fire department, McCabe said, and one of the big ones for him was that he believed he had good ideas for how to move the department forward. When asked for examples of those ideas, McCabe spoke about changes to help reduce response times, particularly around alerts within fire stations.
McCabe also took over as fire chief soon after the completion of a 2021 study that looked at the placement of fire stations in Aurora and response times. That study recommended moving Fire Station 4 and Fire Station 9, plus building a Fire Station 13 — projects that broke ground under McCabe’s leadership.
During a groundbreaking ceremony for Fire Station 13 late last year, McCabe said that a station in that area had been talked about since he started at the department. The city’s new fire station is the first to be located north of Interstate 88 in Aurora.
And the $35 million Fire Station 4 project includes more than just a typical station. The building is also set to be the fire department’s new headquarters, moving leadership out of its current headquarters in downtown that was built in the 1980s, which McCabe told The Beacon-News last year was “busting at the seams.”
The new fire department headquarters and Fire Station 4 building is being constructed on the same site as the Aurora Police Department, creating a public safety campus.
The Aurora Fire Department has needed the City Council’s support for all the growth it has been able to do over the last few years, according to McCabe. And although some may think the department grew too much, he said, fire staff has grown only 20% over the last eight years as compared to a 31% increase in calls over that same time.
Plus, calls went up “immensely” from 1998 to 2017, but the fire department didn’t add a single vehicle in that time, so “now we’re playing catch-up,” McCabe said. While vehicles have been replaced over the years, Aurora last year added the first new fire truck to its fleet since 1998.
There are times, McCabe said, when he gets very torn between the mission of the fire department and “what’s being directed … from other places.” While those new on the job may see him as the ultimate decision-maker, everyone has a boss they need to work with, he said.
Recently, Aurora put out a joint statement between Mayor Laesch, Police Chief Matt Thomas and McCabe about cuts to public safety departments included in the proposed 2026 city budget, with Laesch and McCabe saying in the statement that the reductions would not have an impact on services.
The statement said that “the idea that Aurora’s 2026 budget ‘cuts public safety’ is simply inaccurate,” and noted that public safety departments received the lowest percentage funding reductions of any city departments, plus that both police and fire would still be receiving more funding than was included in this year’s budget.
The International Association of Firefighters Local 99, which represents Aurora firefighters, recently put out a statement opposing the city’s joint statement.
“There is no scenario where fewer firefighters, less training support, fewer officers and fewer trucks on the street equates to the same level of safety, readiness, or service,” said the statement posted to the local’s Facebook page. “To claim otherwise is irresponsible.”
McCabe told The Beacon-News that he doesn’t want to lose positions either, but he realizes the financial constraints the city has put on the department. He and Deputy Chief Kevin Nickel had multiple meetings with the mayor’s office to fight to get some positions back and push back against discussed layoffs of some recruits, he said.
Ultimately, he said, the mayor’s office agreed to cut positions through attrition instead of layoffs.
When there are less positions, a decision has to be made to either staff vehicles with people working overtime or to not staff some vehicles at all, according to McCabe. Laesch has previously said that two of the department’s four ladder trucks would go unstaffed under the proposed 2026 budget.
McCabe said he is hoping that, in the new year, the city’s “financial picture” changes and any cut positions are able to be restored as soon as possible.
But really, this budget situation is playing, if anything, only a minor part in McCabe’s decision to retire, he said. He isn’t leaving “disgruntled by any means.”
Instead, the biggest contributing factors to his retirement are a combination of health concerns he’s had this year and the fact that his youngest child is finishing up her last semester of college, McCabe said.
He had been going back and forth on whether or not he was going to retire, with his paperwork already filled out but not yet turned it, he said. But it was that fire on the night of Oct. 29 that showed him that the department was in a good place, with incredible staff and leadership, and finally led to him submitting the papers.
As a complete coincidence, McCabe is retiring on the same day as someone he was partnered with on an ambulance for around six years, he said. He recounted times at the station when they’d get into “knock-down, drag-out arguments” but also times when “we laughed so hard we thought were going to throw up.”
Sometimes, firefighters may think leadership forgets what its like to be out on the vehicles, sometimes all night, but “I really haven’t,” McCabe said. And sometimes he really misses it, since “that’s our core mission.”
As for what’s next, McCabe said he isn’t going to be out golfing, lying on the beach or sitting around the house all day — he wants to do something productive.
He’s had people reach out to him about some possibilities, but he’s going to be “very selective” about where he goes next. He doesn’t need to work, he said, but he wants to.
rsmith@chicagotribune.com
