Fire Department Meeting, July 11, 2023

The monthly meeting of the Nottingham Fire and Rescue Department was held at 7 pm on Tuesday, July 11. Department meetings are not recorded or televised, but they are open to the public. I attended in person. 

In addition to members of the department, Town Administrator Ellen White and Selectman Shirland attended in an official capacity. Selectman Shirland said Selectman Bartlett was supposed to be there and was stuck in traffic. More selectmen would have come, but they couldn’t do that because then it would turn the event into an official Board of Selectmen meeting. Selectman Bartlett never arrived. 

Several members of the public with connections to the department also attended.  Interim Fire Chief, Deputy Matt Curry presided over the meeting. Even though at a couple of points in the meeting there were tense moments in reaction to comments, everyone treated each other with utmost respect, and everyone had a strong focus on following the law, running the department in a professional manner, and concern for the welfare of the public.

Late in the meeting, a retired member of the department pointed out that the full-time staff all sat together on one side of the room and the volunteer staff all sat together on the other side of the room. 

[COMMENTARY: I’m quite the newcomer to all of this but I detected before the start of the meeting that there were at least two cliques in the room, the kind one sees in high school: the jocks look and act and dress like X, the band members like Y, the drama club members like Z, etc. The difference was more subtle than that. It was closer to the difference between two college fraternities, one that the members of the football team’s defensive line joined and the other that had the members of the offensive line joined. Everyone knows they are on the same team and everyone knows there’s a distinction.

My inference is that very small towns start out with all-volunteer fire departments. These can be viewed as a kind of social club with a civic function, like the Pawtuckaway Lake Improvement Association. As the town grows larger, some full-time staff are hired. This can be viewed as a club that has some staff to serve the club. As the ratio of staff to club members changes, the organizational dynamics change. They are different cliques. Different cliques have different values and different opinions on how things should be done. 

I aim to imply no value judgment between the cliques; I aim to point out the differences in values and culture. It’s important background information about what is going on in our fire department.]

The meeting began with a roll call. Interim Chief Curry began the meeting saying it was to discuss the next step in moving forward. He outlined three possible courses of action, to be decided via ballot.

1. Have the Deputy continue acting as Interim Chief until the usual election time in December.

2. Hold a special election in 30 days.

3. Turn over the decision to the Board of Selectmen. This would require suspending a portion of the bylaws.

There was much debate about whether option #3 was legal, or at least legal to pursue within the current time frame. There were discussions of whether the method of selecting the Chief should be changed and what legal processes would be required to effect this. 

The Town Administrator said that the Board of Selectmen had discussed whether the town should hire a full-time Chief to be appointed by the board. This is impossible in the short term. Not only is there no budget authority for it, but at present the process is governed by 1995 Warrant Article #25 which stipulates that the Fire Department is to elect the Fire Chief and the Board of Selectmen can veto this choice, but is otherwise supposed to approve it. Unless the town calls a special election for this, any substantive change to the process must wait until the next town meeting.

Selectman Shirland said he did not think #3 was a viable option at this time. No group conclusion about option #3 was pursued. It was left on the ballot, giving rise to concerns about whether the final decision would be based on a majority or a plurality. 

There was a lengthy debate over who was entitled to vote. Different documents described this in different ways, using different terms, and leaving terms undefined. The construction of the documents did not consider that there could be a situation like the one the department now faced.

Although all of the participants were highly respectful of each other on this issue, and they carefully cited documents that supported their views, it is evident that the volunteers hold the political power and authority over leadership and the smaller, full-time staff of career employees do not. It’s easy enough to surmise that they might have negative feelings about this, even though they were fully aware of what they had gotten themselves into and aware that this organizational form was common. 

It appears undisputed that none of the current complaints associated with the former Chief go back any further than about summer of last year. They appear to be associated with the passage of 2022 warrant article #5 which added 3 full-time employees to the staff of the Fire Department. 

Interim Chief Curry was asked for his feelings on the matter. He was stoic. He said he was willing to do whatever the department decided. He thought it was their decision. He was asked directly whether he wanted to be Chief. He dodged the question. 

There was a question about whether someone who was not a member of the department could be elected Chief. Not according to the bylaws. 

Everything was highly civil up to this point. Then a member said that this meeting was “bullshit” because the department had a good chief and there was a “bullshit” investigation to remove him. 

This put a brief chill on the room. No one responded or reacted. It was decided to proceed with voting by secret ballot and it was decided that 15 members of the department had the right to vote. The results:

• 7 votes to retain Matt Curry as Acting Chief for the remainder of the term (i.e., until December)

• 4 votes to hold a special election in the department

• 3 votes to waive the bylaws

• 1 abstention

There appeared to be a consensus that the department should accept the option that got a plurality. 

Acting Chief Curry was again asked how he felt about this. Stoicly, he said that he will do what has to be done. 

Selectman Shirland pointed out that the department was without a Deputy. There was a discussion that Chief Curry should appoint a Deputy. Chief Curry declined to do so, at least for the time being. 

Selectman Shirland suggested the town could bring in consultants from MRI for help. Someone asked how long that would take. The Town Administrator said at least six months. 

A member brought up the issue of what the department is going to do about the public’s perception of the department. While the member did not think that Charla Stevens’ report about the department was true, the report has damaged the department’s reputation. “I know we all want to move forward. Are we just going to ignore the report? Was the only reason for the report to fire the Chief?”

The Town Administrator said that Interim Fire Chief Dale Sylvia had been charged with addressing all of the issues with equipment and that she believed there should no longer be any concerns about that. However, the former Interim Chief was given no authority to address personnel issues. 

A former member of the department asked, “how is the atmosphere around here?” He noted that the full-timers were all sitting together on one side of the room and the volunteers on the other. Then he started praising the work of the former Chief. This raised tensions in the room. 

By this point in the meeting a few of the full-timers had left the room. They quickly came back in to watch the interaction.

Chief Curry then broke his stoic silence. He said this wasn’t a department decision. “We now have three thousand people telling fifteen people how to run a fire department.” Then he and the former member got into a dispute over the circumstances over which the former member left the department. 

Selectman Shirland intervened to calm the situation, saying the department needs to focus on what has to be done next rather than rehashing past events. 

As a way of creating closure, Chief Curry said, “I’m sorry. This is where we’re at.”  

He asked the department Chaplin to close the meeting with a prayer. The meeting adjourned at 8:30 pm

—---

It’s unusual to have an unfamiliar person show up at a staff meeting, sit off to the side and type furiously. People who did not know me inferred my identity. 

Lieutenant Ross asked if I was who he thought I might be. He told me that he personally witnessed some of the events in Charla Stevens’ report. He said they not only did not happen as she claimed they had, but that she never asked him for his account of what happened. I asked him if that was confidential or may I attribute it to him. He said it’s for the record.

Not a single member of the department said anything that could be construed as an endorsement of the firings of the Vilchocks. No member of the department has reached out to me in support of any of the accusations or any approval with regard to how the town handled the complaints. The closest thing I have to that is a private communication from a former member of town government who said the former Chief was a prick who was difficult to work with and who had run off employees. 

[COMMENTARY: People management is difficult. Those who have not managed a lot of subordinates are prone to having unrealistic ideas of what the process entails. Great managers are not in abundant supply, particularly for a wage of $11k per year, which is what Nottingham paid the Chief. In the last budgeting cycle, at one Budget Committee meeting, Budget Committee member Tom Butkiewicz exclaimed to the former Chief that at that wage he was quite a bargain for the town.]

I asked Interim Chief Matt Curry if I may photograph the damaged bumper on Engine #2. He personally escorted me to the vehicle. When I got there I was perplexed. I was unable to detect anything wrong. “Where is the damage?” I asked. He pointed out that the bumper is not perfectly level. Maybe if one could get a good frontal view of this it would be evident, but the truck was in the garage. I could only get a good view from the side. I could not see it.

The $8,000 damage done to the bumper of Engine #2

I have minimal experience with big trucks. I don’t know what might have caused this or if an operator could have been aware of it. If it were my car I would not spend a penny on the issue or make a claim with my insurance company about it.

Engine #2 is public property. If you have expertise in such matters, I encourage you to go inspect it yourself before it gets an $8k repair. I will publish your evaluation (at least a summary). In your evaluation please give particular attention to the questions of why the operator should have been aware of it and why they should have considered it significant. Did it even happen while someone was driving it? Could some heavy weight have been put on one end of the bumper while the truck was parked? These are important questions because of this reason for termination provided to former Fire Chief Vilcock.

For readers who like to entertain theories that might get them dismissed as “conspiracy theorists,” a person whom I infer to be a retired member of the department came up to me to give me an interesting theory. He started out by saying he once had a job where part of his employee evaluation was about how much business he brought in for the company. He wasn’t in sales and did not think sales had anything to do with his role. He objected, to no avail. 

Then he pitched his theory. What if the town’s former Interim Town Administrator, a person employed by Municipal Resources, Inc. was evaluated the same way he had been? What if he were evaluated on what additional MRI services he could sell? Regardless of whether he found the needs or … created them. In his last week on the job. 

He concluded that the town should avoid doing business with MRI.

Have fun debating that one on Facebook.