Forest Rothchild, county director of public safety, left, speaks with Samuel Miller, emergency management specialist right, at the Lysock View Complex. KAREN VIBERT-KENNEDY/Sun-Gazette

The journey that led Forest Rothchild to being selected as the county’s new director of public safety began in western Massachusetts, Amherst, exactly, where he grew up and with each leg of that journey he built the resume that made him aptly suited for the job.

During his younger years, he was a lifeguard, and a volunteer junior Emergency Management Technician (EMT) when he was in high school. He had also done nursing assistant type work on a more personal front.

“I have a sister with a permanent disability,” he shared.

“So that had, in its own way, kind of been a guiding aspect of how I’ve come to engage and realize that you never know where somebody might need assistance or who you might come across,” he added.

He did an enlistment, went to school, traveled and even though he worked in the private sector for a long time and was very much driven by what he called “a corporate mindset culture,” he admitted that he “kept gravitating back to community engagement.”

Later in his life, he and his wife moved to the Worcester area where he had started his own business, but he was still part of a volunteer firefighters’ team.

He had gotten his EMT and was on the Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) team and had even gotten his wife and sister-in-law involved.

“It’s tying back to knowing your community. Knowing who’s there and how you can support them,” he said.

And from a personal satisfaction perspective that’s what he kept reverting back to, he said.

Then around 2014, the New England area had 12 to 15 inches of snow. He had been traveling all around the world and his wife had been dealing with the weather.

“My wife was like, I’m just over this,” he said and that’s when she found a job in Florida and they moved. Rothschild ended up joining the Florida aquarium as its dive safety coordinator.

“I oversaw all dive-related activities for the aquarium which also oversaw all the volunteers that dealt with aquarium maintenance. We also did outreaches, whether it was community cleanup , doing coral planting restoration,” he said.

One of the biologists was joining the Florida Wildlife Conservation, which is like Pennsylvania’s Department of Natural Resources, and they encouraged him to make that move too.

So, at age 42, he found himself — as he put it, “the old man of my academy class.”

“But it wasn’t about beating the 20-year-olds,” he said.

“It was about bettering myself and familiarizing myself with the laws. But, I also realized where I was able to contribute was we have a lot of these very young officers that were like,’oh, I’m the best cop in the world.’ Keep in mind, you’re a conservation officer — let’s dial this back a little bit,” he said.

“It was about the balance of life. How do you engage? How do you talk to people,” he added.

At that point, he found himself gravitating toward more of a mentorship role — “let’s look at how we engage with people,” he said.

The agency asked him to get into public information working on messaging and communication, working with the public in regard to seasonality, particularly the hurricanes common to Florida.

“I was the guy who was doing the annual PSA”s (Public Service Announcements) about how to secure your boats, how to take care of your animals, and how to prepare your hurricane kits,” he said.

With over a million registered vessels in Florida, Memorial Day, the Fourth of July and Labor Day are considered the boating holidays.

“If you’re intoxicated on a vessel, now imagine you get that back and you’re now in a vehicle. Not only is a vehicle an obvious danger to be driving impaired, but now you’re dealing with a 10,000 pound boat in tow behind you. So DUI enforcement was a big kind of messy part of this,” he added.

“I started realizing that messaging and coordinating became kind of a bigger part and this is kind of getting back to the community,” he said.

When Florida reactivated their state guard program, a civilian volunteer defense force to help during emergencies, Rothschild got on board and was eventually promoted to captain in charge of operations over maritime statewide.

Florida, from one end to the other is about 1200 miles with a population of 22 million people. Similar to this state it is composed of counties. And it wasn’t just one county. This is similar to

“We’ve got, like, 67 counties in Florida, and then we’ve got hurricanes. You’ve got people from all over the country and all over the world. And so you’re dealing with languages. You’re doing the personalities and like, Oh, this is how we used to do it in Minnesota, yes, but we’re in Florida, and how policies are in Florida are a little different,” he said.

“So the Who I am is through schooling, I did the masters of emergency management, through UCF, through community engagements of the state guard, through the state law enforcement and doing the PIO, or when I was helping with Department of Financial Services, where I found myself most engaged was usually on the community engagement. Part of it, the education, the familiarization, because it’s easy to go, ‘no, this is this is the law. This is it, and you’re wrong.’ But that doesn’t resolve the situation where, if you can educate, if you can familiarize people with what’s going on…you have to do it through education,” he said.

Rothchild said that it’s unfortunate that law enforcement is only seen as “only through a heavy fisted action versus conversation and education.”

“To be able to take a role that is not focused on the law enforcement perception, but through community engagement, conversation, education, awareness, that was a stronger match to who I find I am at a core at ethics as morale, as philosophy of engaging with people. I understand that in society, we agree upon certain norms to live together. Some people choose to, some people choose not to. But that said, I would also rather try to offer a helping hand than go you’re wrong and you now have to be punished.,” he said.

“OK, here’s the situation, let’s see if we come up with a resolution. I don’t want to worry about the punitive side of it. I’ll let the court systems deal with that. Let the police deal with that. Let’s help people with what’s going on,” he continued.

“I look at my early life, which was far more hospitality-driven because I helped open the Bellagio in Las Vegas, several of the casinos I’ve spent years overseas, hotels and restaurants. I think perhaps that hospitality side paired with the humanitarian side is really what kind of brought me to this. And I think, while it may not be, it’s certainly a straight path to how I came here. It actually is a nice blend, because I think that sometimes it’s like the church mentality of being there for your community. I can do that without having to be under the auspices of one structure or one organization I can provide service to everybody as part of the team,” he said.