Saying it’s a matter of public safety, members of the municipal body that oversees the New Canaan Fire Department are calling for the town to re-add funding for an assistant chief position in the agency.
The Board of Selectmen following a back-and-forth with Fire Chief Albe Bassett removed a request for $121,000 in salary for the full-time assistant chief position in January, during the first major phase of the fiscal year 2025 budget process. (The job would also come with a benefits package that town Human Resources officials put at about 40% of the salary.)
After Bassett submitted a memo to the Board of Selectmen saying he could try to make do with $71,000 in overtime that would go to line officers in lieu of the full-time assistant chief, the selectmen did add a $50,000 overtime line item to the Fire Department’s budget (which still must be approved by the Board of Finance and Town Council). In the memo, obtained by NewCanaanite.com through a public records request, Bassett listed five duties that cannot be filled by line officers “on a 24/7 basis.” They include representing the chief as needed, supervising the other line officers, HR functions such as negotiations, budget-related work and fire marshal duties.
Members of the Fire Commission during a special meeting held Feb. 8 described such an accommodation as inadequate.
“Basically this turns on its head what our business plan was a number of years ago as we planned to hire an assistant chief for then-Chief [Jack] Hennessey, and part of that was based on the workload, as Albe has been describing it, and the responsibilities across the entire fire service,” Fire Commission Chair Jack Horner said during the meeting, which was held via videoconference and included liaisons from the finance board.
The department had funding for a half-year of the assistant fire chief approved, though Bassett hasn’t been able to home in on a strong candidate yet, having received resumes in November, with what he called “a true assessment to see who the best candidate is based on needs” still ahead.
Horner said, “When Chief Hennessey retired, we had agreed with the Commission and with HR and with Chief Bassett that we would give Chief Bassett time to ascertain the type of position he needed as an assistant fire chief and the type of person he would need to fill that role, and we were in the process of executing that and basically the Board of Selectmen said ‘No,’ so, point blank that’s where we are.”
Horner referred to selectmen budget hearings held Jan. 23 and 30. At the Jan. 23 hearing, Selectman Amy Murphy Carroll asked whether the department’s proposed spending plan of $4.7 million (a 4.43% or $268,849 increase over current spending, ) assumed that the position of assistant fire chief would be staffed. Bassett said yes. Murphy Carroll noted that it was nearly February already and asked, “You are operating like this, so do you need it?” At the Jan. 30 meeting where the selectmen voted to pass their budget to the finance board, Human Resources Director Cheryl Pickering Jones said that she and First Selectman Dionna Carlson had met with Bassett and that “he was willing to look at different ways of handling it.”
“He did put a memo in front of you that would take the assistant chief out,” Pickering Jones said. “What it would do is put more money in so he could bring more trainers in and use his captains in other areas to see how that works.”
Yet that also is not ideal, fire officials said, in part because it means putting even more onto captains and lieutenants who already have specific duties. (After Bassett’s presentation at the Jan. 23 hearing, the selectmen said that the fire chief is routinely working 60-plus hours.)
Bassett noted during the Fire Commission’s special meeting that the lack of an assistant chief also means no one else can handle HR or other supervisor-related responsibilities, including budgeting, pinching the command staff and further weakening his own span of control.
“I can’t be at a meeting out of town that affects the community and the Fire Department, and be across the street for something else that’s affecting us,” Bassett said. “So I have to prioritize that and something gets lost there, unfortunately. I’ll compare it to the Police Department, where the police chief can be across the street asking for something in a Board of Selectmen meeting and one of his captains or his deputy, which are both staff positions, can be at two other places. They can be providing training and be at a police chief meeting somewhere else. So something’s always missing when I get those conflicting meetings.”
The comments were directed at three Board of Finance members who are liaisons to the Fire Department during the budget process: Michael Chen, Colm Dobbyn and Robert Hamill. The Board of Finance is able to add items to the proposed municipal budget before it goes for final review and sign-off by the Town Council, which is not able to add to the budget. The full finance board is scheduled to review the Fire Department’s spending plan during a budget hearing Thursday.
Chen asked the Commission whether the department could live with the overtime line item for the upcoming fiscal year “and then come back and say, ‘This didn’t work out?’ ”
Horner said in response: “Frankly, we‘ve been living with it for a while now. Could we live with it? I guess. I think Albe is probably underestimating at the $70,000 level.”
He added, “Let’s put it this way: We are always talking about ‘best practices’ around this town. This is not a best practice. This is the Fire Department. This is public safety and it’s the safety of our citizens and our property here and the safety of our emergency personnel. So I can pitch it to you any which way you want to hear it, but that’s the fact of the matter and that’s where we are.”
Commissioner Beth Jones (herself a former selectman) said to the Board of Finance representatives, “I would strongly hope that you guys would consider putting this back in because I think the chief has been waiting for it, he needs it and I think the Board of Selectmen is a bunch of new guys—well, [Selectman] Steve [Karl] has been on Town Council—but I don’t think probably that Amy and Dionna understand the history of this issue and so they saw it as, ‘Well, he hasn’t had it before, we can get rid of it.’ I think at least you, Michael, have seen the history of this and we have been very nicely and very patiently waiting for many years now, and I think we’re due this position.” (Note: Murphy Carroll served for nine years on the Board of Finance.)
Asked by Chen for his take on the selectmen’s reasons for cutting funding for the assistant chief position, Bassett said, “Honestly it’s a bad year for money, is how I read it. With other stuff going on, it just gets pushed back.”