Staying with the story
The Springfield News-Sun has provided ongoing coverage about the city of New Carlisle’s investigation into the city’s fire division.
New Carlisle City Council members will hold a work session later this month to get more information about alleged misconduct and other problems within the city’s fire division that some say could threaten residents’ safety.
Council members voted unanimously Monday night to hold the session with City Manager Randy Bridge at 6:30 p.m. Aug. 24 after current and former firefighters continued to complain about Chief Bradley Phillips and the fire division.
“We’re going to try to resolve what’s going on. I think it’s warranted … We’ve heard a lot of different things that we had not heard previously,” Mayor Lowell McGlothin said.
The work session comes after the department spent $10,000 on an investigation by two fire safety consultants into allegations made in an anonymous letter to the council in the spring.
The probe uncovered no wrongdoing by the chief and dismissed nearly all the complaints outlined in the anonymous letter as either trivial or having already been addressed.
But Capt. Doug Pierson, Assistant Fire Chief Ward Moeller and former fire chief Ron Grout urged council members to take another look at the department.
“You do have a problem. You have a very serious problem,” Grout told council members.
Staffing problems are a daily issue, Pierson said, and are made worse because members live too far away and cannot respond quickly to local fires and emergencies.
The number of volunteer firefighters has dwindled to 10 and the majority have stopped showing up, he said.
“What happened to the volunteers? If you’re not welcomed, you don’t stay. If you’re not part of a clique that’s been created out there, you leave,” Grout said.
Phillips wasn’t at the meeting Monday night, but questioned on Tuesday why issues related to the fire department continue to be brought before the city council after the investigation found no wrongdoing.
“It’s only an issue for a very small group of individuals that can’t accept the findings of the investigation,” Phillips said. “… I told both investigators and the city manager from the very beginning, if the investigators felt I was not capable of running the fire division, I would be more than happy to move on. But we’ve investigated the fire division … and they’re just not happy with whatever answer we give them.”
The decline in volunteer firefighters is a national problem, Phillips said, and he created a recruitment team to address the issue.
Grout recently extinguished a fire in his neighborhood at the home of a man who was bedridden before two firefighters and an officer showed up and assisted getting the man out of the home.
“Where were all the officers?” Pierson said. “… What are you going to do if there’s a structure fire and somebody dies? Is it going to take somebody to die or get hurt bad? All of your officers live far away.”
It’s important officers adhere to an ordinance requiring they live no further than five miles from the division, Grout said, because they need to be on-scene and making sure no one gets hurt.
“You’ve got them living in Quincy, DeGraff, Troy,” Grout said.
In addition, Grout said after he put out the fire in his neighborhood, the officer who arrived later told him to leave the home. Grout added that Phillips later posted on Facebook inferring that Grout violated Ohio law by interfering with a fire.
“I did this for 30 years. I’m still a firefighter. I’m still a paramedic. I never interfered with anything. It’s this type of conduct that’s not healthy for this community,” Grout said. “If you want to rebuild this division it has to start at the top. If he can play cowboy and do whatever he wants and be not only supported, but commended by the city manager, folks we’ve got a problem.”
Phillips told the Springfield News-Sun the incident commander asked Grout to leave the building until he had a chance to assess the fire scene.
Pierson also asked council why a lieutenant who responded to a fire scene after he had been drinking was only suspended for two weeks, allowed to keep his rank and continued working at the department. More should have been done, he said.
Councilman Rick Lowrey agreed. The department should have investigated the issue, he said, and if true, the lieutenant should have been dismissed.
“That’s absolutely horrible, if it happened,” Lowrey said.
Councilman Ethan Reynolds, who has been critical of the investigation into the fire department, said the city council should ask the Ohio Attorney General’s Office to look into the department.
The city brought in attorney Larry Bennett and ex-fire chief Bill Kramer for two days of investigation in June. Their final report outlined changes that could be made to improve the department and possibly save up to $13,000 annually.
“We wasted a bunch of money for the vaguest of vague reports I’ve ever read in my entire life … I wouldn’t have given a passing grade on that if I was a teacher. It would have been definitely an F. I’ve seen sixth graders do a better job at writing a report than this. There was just no detail,” Reynolds said.
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