Safety First on Bald Head Island

Bald Head Island’s new emergency services director Paul Anderson shares his lifelong passion for public service.

Paul Anderson, the newly appointed emergency services director for the Village of Bald Head Island, first initiated his passion for public service right after high school, when he joined the Navy and served four years of active duty, including deployment aboard the USS Carl Vinson after 9/11.

“Then I decided that it was time to start a family, but military life really wasn’t conducive to that,” he says. “So I got out and into another kind of area of public safety by joining the Tucson Fire Department in 2006 and spent 20 years there.”

Tucson, Arizona, is where Anderson and his wife’s family migrated from Minnesota, so it was a natural move to start their family there, too. Over the next 20 years serving with the fire department, he worked his way up from firefighter for about two years to a paramedic for eight years (he still has his paramedic certification) to captain to the training division to chief officer, battalion chief and deputy chief performing operational duties over a group of 650.

The Anderson family’s next move? Coastal North Carolina.

“My wife and I had traveled out to the East Coast for a number of years, and we really fell in love with the coastal Carolina area,” Anderson says. “We actually purchased some property out here a number of years ago, and we still have it, so when this job opportunity came up, it just seemed like something that I would at least throw my hat in the ring, and when I was able to get it, I’m so grateful for that.”

His first day on the job was July 1, 2026, so he is still learning the ropes, but he has been happy overall with the transition.

“I have a lot of support. I work with some fabulous people,” Anderson says. “I’m excited for it.”

The main goal for his role is to provide leadership, policy direction and coordination for the Department of Public Safety on the island.

“I’ve learned that Bald Head Island is a very unique and special place,” Anderson says. “I’m trying to maintain the character and the culture of the island. It’s a fabulous place to be, and the folks that work here in the public safety department have done a great job over the last few years of moving the organization forward and bringing us into compliance regionally with fire departments, police departments and so forth. I’m just trying to keep the momentum that the folks here have built up over the last two or three years.”

Anderson explains that the municipality of Bald Head Island is unique compared to most in the country, in that public safety employees are triple certified: law enforcement, fire suppression and medical.

“We find it works out well based upon the fact that we’re on an island and we need our folks to be proficient in a lot of different things,” Anderson says. “We’re trying to use the village’s resources and be good stewards of the tax dollars, so if our folks can carry three certifications that helps us spread that out a little bit. … We have paramedics on every shift.”

Anderson says his role is to provide a singular point of leadership and responsibility for the public safety department.

“We have a couple of deputies, one over law enforcement and one over fire EMS who are top-notch, and they’ve taken this department in a great direction, but they’re task saturated. So we needed to have someone like myself to take on that leadership and do long-term planning and strategic growth for the organization.”

Public safety on Bald Head Island means being responsible for anywhere between a few hundred full-time residents on the island to a mighty swell in the population with visitors over the summer.

“Our primary objective is to make sure that we do that responsibly and that we’re meeting the demands of the village and the citizens here,” Anderson says. “We love the visitors. We also ask that they respect the island and what we have going on out here as well.”

Although he’s plugged in all the time to be all-aware and must be within a 30-minute response window to be on the island if needed, he and his wife attempt to have downtime with their family of six (two kids are in college and two are in school here locally).

“Our kids play soccer and club sports, so that keeps us busy for most of the time, but as we relocate here, we are just trying to learn the area,” Anderson says with a laugh. “We’re trying to find fun things to do, and we’ve been in the process of hunting down our favorite beach. … Every weekend we try to hit a different one and figure out what we like. We’re just enjoying the new environment and atmosphere, which is obviously much different than Arizona, and we’re definitely enjoying the exploration side of it.”