After eight years as the president of the Oregon State Fire Fighters Council, Karl Koenig is stepping down. His successor, Kevin Larson of Gresham, is taking over after a unanimous election at their convention in April. Larson is honored, excited, and — in the words of his predecessor — “very, very capable.”
The Oregon State Firefighters Council has handled legislative affairs for firefighters across the state since 1936. Eight district vice presidents communicate their needs to the elected president, who lobbies the state on their behalf. The council president can affect major change for Oregon’s 3,500 firefighters.
Their main role is securing funding from the state. “Sometimes folks don’t really understand what it costs to put a fire engine full of people on the road and have them properly equipped,” Koenig says.
Koenig speaks with pride about his accomplishments as the council president. His most prized project? A firefighter apprenticeship program he helped start after years of planning. Decades, actually. “From the early ‘90s, I have emails saying, ‘Hey, why don’t we do this?’ And now, it’s finally happened,” he says.
The Oregon Fire Apprenticeship program accepts prospective firefighters and pays them while they take college classes and get up to 4,000 hours of training over two years. The program is different from comparable programs in Washington and California due to the volume of on-the-job training it provides. Apprentices are paid 73% of a firefighter salary their first year and 80% their second year in the program.
“We’ve had tremendous, tremendous success,” Koenig says. Koenig saus the program’s job placement rate is above 90%.His successor, Kevin Larson, says even that is an understatement.
“A lot of them are actually hired in the middle of our program because Oregon is always down firefighters,” Larson says.
Although Koenig is stepping down from the president role, he’ll continue on as the apprentice program coordinator.
Larson says he and Koenig have been talking for the past year about top priorities for Oregon firefighters. In order to attract top talent, they’re looking to improve pension benefits to provide better retirement security for firefighters. They face higher rates of cancer than the general public, not to mention the many direct safety risks they encounter. Because of this, they are seeking expanded cancer presumptions from the state so that firefighters being treated for cancer wouldn’t have to prove they developed the disease from their job.
As the District 4 Vice President for 10 years, Larson lobbied on behalf of the firefighters of Hillsboro, Gresham, Astoria, Columbia River Fire and Rescue, and McMinnville. In 2025, he secured state funding for two big projects in Gresham: $500,000 for a new training tower at Station 72 and $8 million to rebuild Station 74.
“You call, we come, and hopefully you hear our sirens of the fire engine when you hang up the phone,” Koenig told the Labor Press. “That’s our goal, and Kevin is able to articulate that. He continues our longstanding tradition of doing what’s right not only for our members but for the communities we serve.”
