Fire metaphors come cheap, but votes aren’t forged much hotter than the one cast by Bainbridge fire commissioner Dave Coatsworth last week.

With his fellow commissioners Earl Johnson and Jim Johnson already set in their views, Coatsworth was the swing vote in deciding whether the department would conduct a full search for a new chief, or simply tender an offer to former fire chief Kirk Stickels. The vote came in an emotionally tense fire hall packed with career and volunteer firefighters, untethered in their support of the former chief.

By way of analogy, try to imagine the council chambers packed to the rafters with City Hall employees vocally pressuring the council on a key administrative hiring decision, or teachers jamming the high school library to dragoon the school board into hiring the employees’ principal of choice. Then compound matters by imagining that key councilors or school board members also work for the very agency they’re trying to govern, as colleagues of those who are applying the political heat.

That was the position in which Coatsworth found himself. Fire metaphors come cheap, but sometimes they’re apt.

When he ran for fire board a year ago, this newspaper did not endorse Dave Coatsworth for that very reason – as both fire volunteer and fire commissioner, he would be sitting on both sides of the table, his loyalties divided between the responsibilities of management and the desires of labor. Island voters decided otherwise and put him on the board; last week he bucked his professional colleagues and cast a tough and admiral vote. But the scenario shows precisely why the fire board needs to be expanded from three members to five, and why commissioners need to come from outside the department.

The Bainbridge Island Fire Department is a public agency managed and operated for the benefit of the community at large, not the department membership. While any sensible board will always give great currency to the views of firefighters – they are the professionals putting it all on the line in emergencies – those views will not necessarily prevail. Nor should they, with 23,000 other constituents to consider.

The question of expanding the fire board could go before voters as soon as November, and we trust islanders will support the move. Increasing the representation is a good-governance issue, one that can ensure the board enjoys the broad range of voices and experience found on the school and park boards and city council. Then it will be incumbent on the sitting fire commissioners to appoint two new members, citizens free of conflicted loyalties, who can make their decisions independent of the passions of the day.

In the meantime, there’s the a matter of selecting a new chief. To carry their argument, firefighters have relied on false alternatives – either you hire the chief we want, or you’ll hire a bad chief. Coatsworth and fellow commissioner Earl Johnson saw through that smoke and insisted on a full search. We trust that effort will bring all parties – firefighters, watchdog groups, interested citizens, other public officials – into play.

Former chief Kirk Stickels could well emerge as the best available candidate, but if there’s someone better out there, wouldn’t the firefighters themselves be best served by finding out?

Firefighters, commissioners and the Bainbridge community all want the same thing: the fire chief we can get. Let’s all acknowledge that, and turn down the heat.