Jim Vlassopoulos is a retired Deputy Fire Chief from the Washington DC Fire and EMS Department. He retired as the Operations Chief of a whole platoon group that included all fire and EMS resources and over 400 personnel. His duties included effective public safety incident mitigation, life-safety, critical daily resource staffing, and assuring firefighter well-being to name a few. Prior to being assigned the Deputy Fire Chief of Operations Division Platoon #2, he was a uniformed Chief Information Officer (CIO) with DCFD. During his tenure as CIO, he remained a champion of public safety communications, interoperability, and fire service technology and served as the Council of Governments (COG) Fire Communications Subcommittee chairman. He is credited with successfully integrating mobile 911 emergency dispatch, routing of the closest emergency units leveraging GPS technologies, and electronic patient care reporting systems in all DC Fire & EMS units and valuing the importance of stakeholder collaboration to achieve agency goals.

Working for Training Outreach, Jim has been the Accreditation Manager with Montgomery County Fire Rescue Service (MCFRS) for five years. His duties include integrating daily MCFRS processes into the framework of the Commission on Fire Accreditation International (CFAI) business processes, policy development, training, and close analysis of MCFRS response time performance. He is also leading MCFRS’ efforts to achieve accreditation status again in 2018 by organizing the required agency self-assessment and writing of the self-assessment manual and conducting the required community risk assessment and developing the updated Standards of Cover manual. Jim reports directly to the Fire Chief and continues to assist MCFRS achieving organizational excellence through accreditation.