REVEALED: Austin fire chief who denied resources ahead of Texas flooding prioritized 'increasing diversity'

The Austin Firefighters Association intends to hold a vote of no confidence on Fire Chief Joel G. Baker over his failure to deploy advance teams to flood ravaged Kerr County ahead of the destruction. Now, it has been revealed that Baker, the first black fire chief in Austin, prioritized diversity goals shortly after coming onto the job.

He's been accused of not deploying Austin's specialized teams ahead of the destruction, despite having been asked by the state to do so, because Texas was delayed in reimbursing the department for $800,000 in past deployments.

In 2020, after just a year on the job, it became clear that diversity goals were paramount. After taking over Austin's department of about 1,100 firefighters, he said that he didn't want people to "dwell on me being the first African American fire chief, because that's not important. What's important is that I'm not the last African American fire chief."

One of his goals, he said was "really to increase the diversity at the Austin Fire Department. It needs to reflect more of the community we serve because I believe the youth of Austin and our youth in general, you will be what you see those young African American, young Latinos, people in the Asian community or LGBT community, if they see more firefighter that look like them, they will want to choose the Austin Fire Department as a career as well."

He was still trying to meet his goal, he told Fox 7 at the time. "Although we had an increase of Africans that had applied, I have not really seen an increase of Africans that have been hired so now we got to find out what's the barrier of getting them hired," Baker said.

"My goal is to let the community know if I can do it, they can do it, he said.

In 2022, a volunteer chaplain with the Austin Fire Department brought suit after he "was fired for posting on his personal blog that men and women are biologically different and should not compete against each other in sports, a lawsuit was filed in an effort to protect his rights to free speech and religious freedom," The Texan reported in 2024. He was dismissed in 2021, after Baker took over as fire chief.

The Alliance Defending Freedom represented Dr. Andrew Fox and revealed that an "unknown number of individuals allegedly at the Fire Department anonymously complained about the blog posts" Fox had made on his own page. Fox had said that "transgender ideology is blatantly hijacking the platform of athletic sport under the guise of inclusivism."

If the vote of no confidence passes, it wouldn't remove Baker from his position, but it would send a message to the people who do have that authority that his firefighters have no confidence in his leadership. Over 100 people and 27 children have died in the Guadalupe River flood and many are still missing.