Firing The Fire Board

Can't we all just get along?

The entrance to hell is framed with bad decisions

This is an essay about the termination of a local fire chief with nearly 40 years of exemplary volunteer service, and how it appears to mirror the larger, significantly global symptoms of growing ineptitude and irresponsibility in ‘representative’ government.

---

There aren’t enough words in my vocabulary to adequately convey or articulate the foul smorgasbord of thoughts and feelings that are clearly at war with each other as I sit here contemplating all the events of the last week. The twisting spires of these individual tempests slink downward from the bowels of a chaotic sky full of questions and doubts like little destructive tornadoes of fitful energy, tearing up parcels of time on my calendar, sending shredded hours, minutes, and daily opportunities into the air in a flurry of chronological mayhem.

This, of course, is a rather pedantic way of stating I’m having difficulty selecting any one subject from so many to lay hands on. A veritable kaleidoscope of malfeasance and mayhem vies for attention; each must be considered, then wrestled to the ground and subdued long enough to write about in a cogent manner. But I’m tired. This last week I’ve been worn out from a string of medical appointments, so I’m picking on something close by – some low-hanging, albeit rotten fruit. Something that in review, I think you will also find as indicative, telling, revealing – and in many ways it’s a mirror – of the ongoing global clown circus.

Out here in the often-overlooked rural areas of the Pacific Northwest, things are generally quiet. Generally. The biggest news around the community usually revolves around who filled their elk tag this year, or how long it’ll be before the power company can restore power due to a fallen tree, or if the school buses are running late again. It’s a small, pleasantly remote community. Back in 2000, I remember attending a school board meeting at the small K-12 out here. The tiny room had perhaps 10 seats, while the board members stuffed themselves behind a single desk inside the principal’s office. It was cramped, and had all 10 seats been occupied, everyone would’ve been cozily jamming shoulders – but only six or seven were in attendance that evening, and I recall looking out into the darkened shadows of the evening forest marveling just how far away the rest of civilization was from there.

Due to the regional zoning ordinances, land in these parts can’t be subdivided into parcels of less than 5 acres. This acts to thwart attempts for any kind of higher density living which, if you ask most of the locals, is a good thing. Notably, it’s an area of generational families, of living in the same home for decades. An island of permanence in an otherwise toxic landscape of transition and temporary neighbors that defines most of the rest of the American acreage.

It is perhaps this very lack of permanence in American life that I believe is one of the largest undiagnosed social cancers of the last century. In a 2017 publication, Dr. Aude Bernard  suggests Australia, New Zealand and the United States have some of the most mobile populations in the world, seeing between 40 and 55 percent of their populations changing residence every 5 years. This kind of family upheaval has numerous negative effects, not the least of which is painfully experienced by school-aged children.

I’ve been pondering if this routine upheaval is behind so many arbitrary and capricious decisions of late. Perhaps the life-long experience of impermanence; the temporariness of people in our lives is driving the seeming inability or indifference to truly relate to others? Why are so many people ill-equipped to engage in meaningful discussions or negotiations with others?

Even our pillars of “higher education” have vanished from the critical thinking circles of rigorous public discourse. They have fallen fast and hard for intersectional identarian ideologies and gross sexual deviancies; so much so that they are now simply mindless delusion factories. Factories whose sole product are the feckless, soulless acolytes of enforced groupthink and Marxism. Graduates devoid of the critical thinking skills that were once hallmarks of these institutions, are now just carbon-copy idealogues with witheringly expensive credentials and huge student loan debt.

Last year’s Harvard plagiarism debacle illustrates this clearly – over 400 years of rigorous scholarship have been thrown into the mud at the feet of the new god of academia: the DEI dynasty – an institution that John Carter’s Substack, Postcards from Barsoom aptly identifies in his essay, Fake Gay and DEIing of AIDs.

This same indifferent disregard and breathless arrogance that has destroyed Harvard appears to be continuing its cancerous boardroom sweep across the country by power-drunk venomous apparatchiks who gleefully issue destructive diktats from on high, seeking to tear down anyone and anything remotely opposing their newfound authority. The days of working out minor quibbles and personality differences are long gone – replaced by angry Maoist HR-scolds swinging administrative battleaxes around in politically fueled blood-rages.

Case in point…

Out of the blue, a local fire board called a special meeting and terminated the resident fire chief – a volunteer with nearly 40 years of service to the community (the last 27 as the fire chief) – over a minor spat concerning building permits. Yes, you read that correctly. It’s all over county building permits and volunteer (read: absolutely cost-free to the taxpayers) building work - things that typically aren’t in the wheelhouse or responsibilities of most fire chiefs to begin with. But that’s the thrust of their three-page shame-on-you screed that was officiously read aloud to 40-45 locals who had gathered despite having barely 24 hours’ advance notice of the board’s intended Maoist struggle session. During this suspension meeting, the chief was not permitted to speak in his defense at all. Instead, he was repeatedly ‘shushed’ by the chairwoman who took obvious pleasure silencing him while the board attempted to justify the public excoriation.

SILENCE!

There’s more – a lot more detail and nuance – to all of this, but the end result is that a tiny fire department out here in the lonely tall timbers of the Pacific Northwest has lost its veteran chief, who was railroaded out of the 100% volunteer department by a 5-person kangaroo court. One that to date has refused to answer any questions from the public.

Since then, the board refused to allow the assistant chief to take over operations in the interim, a move that further angered the locals and has fueled speculation that the board is working against the public interest. With this latest bizarre move, the balance of volunteers informed the board that they’re out – off on 6-month leaves of absence. This is a clear vote of no-confidence in the board’s ability to appropriately manage the district and a massive loss of experience and capability for the community.

Many locals have expressed no small amount of outrage at the lack of transparency demonstrated at all three public meetings. There’s now a question of their overall integrity: just after suspending the chief in the first meeting, the board claimed that they’d arranged for stand-in emergency services for the district by contacting neighboring departments – a statement that turned out to be patently false. Those same neighboring districts turned around and publicly issued written statements indicating that no such special arrangements had been made.

At the center of the board’s complaint over the chief is a question of what they claim is unauthorized work on a small part of the new station – work designed to accommodate community gatherings. The county states some work has gone on without the requisite building permits. This fact has raised a yet unanswered question as to why the board didn’t originally hire a General Contractor to manage and perform the requested work to begin with. And now they’ve turned it around and used it as the raison d'être for his termination.

Why they continually pestered both the chief and assistant chiefs to do this work over the last several years on their own time and expense is nothing short of strange and curious. The volunteer fire chief has a family, a small farm, a regular full-time job, and in addition to the myriad of duties as fire chief, he’s also on the local school board. The assistant chief is in his late 70’s, and while retired and quite capable in his own right, he isn’t a licensed and bonded General Contractor either.

None of these facts seemed to have made so much as a momentary blip on the board’s insatiable appetite to fire someone over building permits and diktats. It has all the appearance of someone getting their nanny-pants in a twist over miscommunications and spiteful disagreements. Had the board done the right thing the right way at the start, none of this would have taken place. I hardly think it reasonable to assign all blame at the feet of the fire chief, much less turn it into a crusade to try to shame and vilify a man who has tirelessly served his community FOR FREE for the last 40 years.

But this is the kind of clown world we live in today.

A quick study of the makeup of the fireboard reveals not a single one of them has any experience in public safety whatsoever. None of them have ever been toned out at 2:30am on a dark, wintry Oregon night to rescue some meth-addled Portland townie from out of their upside-down Prius parked at the bottom of a 75-foot ice-encrusted embankment. None of them have any experience whatsoever as first responders, other than playing HR-Nanny to fire volunteers who dared to defy their ‘directives.’ (This is a word they seem to really admire, as it’s used nine different times throughout their rambling bloviation.)

Tellingly, two of the five board members have spent almost the entire balance of their lives in academia with no real-world work experience, much less holding positions of high public trust until taking seats on the fire board. But here we are.

A recall effort is underway – the intended Maoist struggle session backfired on the board, with almost everyone except their closest family members and nearest friends voicing strong support of the fire chief. Despite Portland’s proximity, the mind-virus infection has mostly been absent in the local population, some of whom have regional ties going back several generations in this remote logging community. There are always disagreements, but until recently, minor disputes such as working on or not working on a construction project, with or without permits, have been the kind of thing that gets hammered out over a friendly coffee or a quick phone call.

Unfortunately, none of this stopped the board from railroading the chief’s sudden suspension on Sunday into full blown termination three days later on Wednesday.

Despite intense local interest and from state legislators and authorities, the board refused to meet in-person at the local school and instead set up a zoom meeting where the board chair was the only video presence. She limited meeting participation to 100 and had everyone on mute. In doing so, the board continued the pattern of refusing to acknowledge the public’s demand for a transparent and honest meeting where questions could be asked and answered.

The 100-person limit effectively locked out an untold number of locals and representatives, as the number of attendees quickly rose to that number and stayed there for the duration. In addition to the 100 online attendees, another 30-40 watched the zoom meeting from inside the local school library, which had been offered to the board and set up for the special meeting that evening.

While the chief was able to respond using a written statement, he was clearly rattled. There just wasn’t enough time to prepare to address the board’s accusations; his family was recovering from the celebration of life for his wife’s father who had recently passed away. The board seemed to have used the timing of the funeral in their attack calculus, as the special meeting notice was posted the same day of that well-attended ceremony — for a special meeting barely 24 hours later.

The chief’s response included emails that contradicted much of the timing and complaints of ‘disobeying board directives’, but the board really wasn’t listening to anyone, much less the chief as they quickly turned around and terminated his near 40-year volunteer career with less than 10 minutes of deliberation later.

After all of this, I asked myself the question, “What’s happening these days?”

We see these same unresponsive, answer-to-nobody board-o-crats, using the same cheap tricks to hide behind imaginary policies and procedures. We see the same arrogant sophism in our federal government as well – a government which refuses to uphold the immigration laws already on the books, one that quickly sends billions to foreign governments for foreign wars, but won’t properly take care of its own military vets. One that has increasingly used thinly veiled lawfare tactics to openly persecute political rivals one that is trying every trick and tactic in the book to relieve the people of the burdens of the freedom of speech. It is a government which has long since stopped listening to its people – the very people it is called to represent.

If this local fireboard is a litmus of the condition of our ‘representational government’ model, then it’s clear that it is utterly corrupted. It is our hope that the coming monumental recall of all five fire board members out here will be a pattern for the coming election.

---