RE: #2 Trying to make a couple of points here. Somehow, "bilingual" only means Spanish. It should not.
If you are going to work in this country in a critical job such as firefighting, you need to speak English well. It is not the job of government to require a crew chief to speak other languages (a plus in the salary department, sure). I live near a large Vietnamese community, so by the standards of the article, firefighting crew chiefs should be required to speak Vietnamese in that area.
Not my law...this is how they think in Oregon. I'd require every mother's son and daughter to be able to pass a English competency test for safety reasons.
The Washington state Supreme Court decided quite a few years ago that cops had to advise suspects of their legal rights in their native tongue unless they could show that the suspect had an adequate knowledge of english. We used a language bank for a while until their employees started getting subpeoned into court then that went away.