By PATRICK ADRIAN
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WEATHERSFIELD,Vt. — The Weathersfield Selectboard said they felt “at a loss” for how to reach a merger agreement between their two volunteer fire departments, and asked the departments to determine whether they could work together to create a mutual plan for a municipal department.Despite the rejection by voters in March to fund a full- or part-time fire chief position, the selectboard said at their meeting on Monday that they still intend to create a single municipal fire department. Under their plan both the Ascutney and West Weathersfield departments would operate collaboratively, adhering to identical guidelines for safety and training.
The two departments, however, remain “diametrically opposed” to the town’s plan, according to Selectman N. John Arrison, with West Weathersfield strongly in support of a municipal department but Ascutney wanting to remain an independent entity.
Arrison recommended that the two departments collaborate on their own to find an agreement.
“The format meeting of this room has been exhausted,” Arrison said. “I recommend we put the path back to the people most closely involved and ask them to meet privately and find how to accomplish one department with one chief.”
Representatives from each department expressed varying degrees of confidence about trying to work with one another.
“We currently have two departments who are polar opposites,” said West Weathersfield firefighter Josh Compo. “To expect our departments to come together without any real [authority] or mediation from the board would be counterproductive.”
West Weathersfield firefighter Michael Spaulding agreed, telling the board not to expect much from two departments who do not get along.
Ascutney’s Association President Mark Girard said that he was willing to try, though he stressed finding a mediator, recommending they solicit the service of a fire chief from a neighboring town like Springfield or Windsor, Vermont or Claremont.
The one optimistic party was Ascutney Chief Darrin Spaulding, who said he believed that eventually “cooler heads would prevail.”
“I’m going against the grain, but I think we can do it,” Spaulding said. “If you can get us in a room, and it’s not going to happen overnight, but if you let us sit down and work it out, and the selectboard stays out of it, we can get it done.”
Selectboard chair Kelly Murphy said she questioned Spaulding’s confidence about cooler heads prevailing, asking why cooler heads could not prevail during the prior process. Murphy also disagreed with Spaulding’s interpretation of the John Wood report, the 2016 fire department study that recommended that the town merge its departments. Spaulding referenced a fundamental line in the report that reads,“The Town has to be all in or all out, being a middle man does not work and has not been effective for years.” Murphy said that the line meant the town must choose between having a fire department under its own management or only pay contractors for service, not to have no involvement in the fire department.
Selectman Michael Todd supported allowing the departments to work together but said the objectives outlined in the John Wood report must be addressed in their plan.
“The goal for us is that they answer the questions,” Todd said. “If they want to run the whole thing that’s fine, but they need to solve the problems and identify how to move forward.”
Outcomes that Todd identified included how the departments would establish better accounting methods, improving communications between stations and the town, decreasing the fire operation budget, creating uniform safety and training protocol, and coordinate equipment purchases.
Murphy asked the firefighters to meet with their departments and return to the selectboard July 1 meeting with their ideas for how these meetings would run, how often, and an approximate timeline for creating a plan.
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