Mike Smith
The Montana Standard
SILVER BOW COUNTY, Mont. — Decades of simmering tensions and animosity between paid and volunteer fire departments in Butte-Silver Bow County have reached a pitch point and the feuding is spilling into the public arena.
Some differences are being discussed in private between lawyers but the volunteer firefighters have taken several grievances to Butte-Silver Bow commissioners and reserved a time slot before the council Wednesday night.
They’re concerned about pending findings in a study of fire services here, worried about reduced roles and reduced input, and say county officials have scuttled a longtime Fire Advisory Committee that gives them a voice.
“We’ve got to have open communication,” Jerry Brothers, a longtime firefighter with the Home Atherton Volunteer Fire Department, told The Montana Standard. “I don’t feel like the public or the Council of Commissioners know what’s going on between the paid and the volunteers.”
Their main complaint is that the advisory committee hasn’t been re-established since a problem arose in February and they see it as the conduit for communications between the paid and volunteer departments.
But there’s more to the heightened controversy, including the study and what fire services should look like going forward in a growing community.
Rifts over funding, turf, oversight and even respect have existed since the city of Butte and Silver Bow County consolidated local governments in 1977 but kept both paid and volunteer fire departments under one overall budget.
There are nine volunteer departments but the city-county charter says a fire chief for the paid department is also a director of fire services responsible for administrative coordination of the volunteer departments. That person is currently Zach Osborne.
J.P. Gallagher, Butte - Silver Bow’s chief executive, said the frictions have gotten so bad, that a consulting firm hired to examine everything about fire services here claimed it “had never worked in a community where it was so controversial.”
Gallagher said the volunteer departments are “incredibly important” and he’s not looking to consolidate or nix any of them. But their membership is down, he said, some haven’t responded to fire calls and there has to be more collaboration and communication.
“Both sides have their points on this but we’re really at a challenging point of how to move forward,” Gallagher said.
Osborne oversees 36 paid firefighters and a fire marshal and he spent months seeking an independent, comprehensive study of fire services that commissioners agreed to in early 2023.
Firefighters responded to about 2,000 calls annually 20 years ago, he said, but that number is more than doubled now while property tax levies that fund fire services have reached statutory caps.
“This study would give an outside perspective to tell people and tell the commissioners what might be needed,” Osborne told The Standard. “The city’s getting bigger, we’re getting busier and we just can’t stay like we were because that’s the way we’ve always done it.”
The firm that did the extensive study — Emergency Services Consulting International — has yet to formally present its findings to council and there are separate contentions swirling around that.
But Osborne said a draft report found the paid department severely understaffed and recommended that consolidation of services and volunteer departments, among many other things, at least be explored.
“Now that I have been notified that our budget is capped, there are things we have to look at — we should be obligated to look at — before any decisions are made,” he said.
“I’m not saying consolidation is the end-all-be-all solution,” he said. “It might be a total disaster. But the study, having an outside view, said absolutely that should be considered.”
Views from the Volunteers
Brothers recently sent a letter to Council Chairwoman Michele Shea saying he wanted to speak to the full council about concerns over the Fire Advisory Committee.
The committee is required under the city-county charter and is to include three members of the paid fire department it appoints, three volunteers their board appoints and three commissioners the council appoints.
In his letter, Brothers said the fire advisory meetings were canceled “with no explanation as to why.”
But in the letter and in an interview with The Standard, Brothers said the meetings were canceled because paid firefighters did not like one of the commissioners.
Brothers told The Standard the paid firefighters didn’t like that commissioner “mainly because he was more on our side.”
“They got very mad at him and they said as long as he’s on the committee, they weren’t going to attend,” Brothers said.
Gallagher and Osborne said an issue had arisen regarding a commissioner. They didn’t name who it was but said everyone agreed that new members should be appointed to the committee so it had a clean slate.
Brothers said the dispute arose in February and months later, a new committee still hasn’t been established and no meetings have been held.
Brothers says he wants to address commissioners in hopes of getting the committee “back up and running” so the public knows what’s going on in fire services.
Brothers said Monday that an attorney representing the volunteers was in talks with the County Attorney’s Office so discussions about any legal matters would have to go through them.
But in his previous letter to the council, he said “several major discussions” were months behind because there was no Fire Advisory Committee.
Among other things, according to the letter, volunteers: — Want to know what is happening with the study “that was to be delivered last January.” — Had no input into an enhanced, computer-aided dispatch system. — Say the fire chief changed a rural response plan without their input. — Says volunteer firefighters are “being treated like they have no rights as citizens of Butte-Silver Bow " and can’t even see how the 911 center is set up.
Brothers told The Standard he’s been a volunteer firefighter in Butte for 40 years and remembers “going to fires and being called a scab,” but says volunteers have never taken jobs away from the paid department.
He said the paid department wants to make the debate going forward about needing more firefighters and everything else. He hasn’t seen the study, he says, “But I think it came back that they’re not really using the volunteers to the best of their ability.”
Brothers said insurance rates on homes in certain areas could increase if volunteer departments are shut down and in the end, both entities are needed.
“There is no way we can handle Butte totally and there’s no way the paid can handle everybody without us,” he said.
But he said the immediate priority is to get the Fire Advisory Committee going again.
Views from the Fire Chief
Osborne said the dispute regarding the Fire Advisory Committee stems from an ethics allegation a commissioner made against a paid firefighter that Osborne doesn’t consider resolved.
Osborne said he, Gallagher and a commissioner agreed then to “take a fire advisory break.” It has continued in part because of turnover on the council, he said.
He doesn’t think the volunteers and the Council of Commissioners will have problems finding three new members each, but Osborne said paid firefighters represented by a union don’t want to be on the committee.
The meetings usually involved arguments over money, he said, including leftover funds from a tax-increment district that have now been spent.
“The fire advisory meetings were far from healthy — far from healthy,” Osborne said. “They were brutal to go to.”
The county used more than $50,000 in federal funds to pay for the fire study and part of the contract requires the company to formally present its findings before council.
“I need the presentation to come from them — not me, not the firefighters union, not J.P., not the volunteers,” Osborne said. “It needs to come from them.”
That has been delayed, he said, because interviews the consultants did with a group of commissioners and a separate one with volunteers “were not welcoming.” And in July, Osborne said, volunteers told ESCI an attorney would be contacting them.
“They felt the tensions were so stressful here that they didn’t want to come back and have anything to do with it (a presentation),” Osborne said.
They recently agreed to do a presentation but a date has not been set, Osborne said.
If the findings are similar to those in a draft report, there might be bigger issues to discuss going forward. Staffing, funding and consolidation should all be included in that discussion, Osborne said.
Taxes for fire services are at their maximum, he said, and that is the “elephant in the room nobody wants to talk about.”
“We have volunteer departments that have been on very few calls, if any, in the last year, but we still pay for multiple apparatus in their buildings,” he said. “I don’t want the volunteers to go away but if we’re speaking about budget concerns, then we’d be blind not to think that might be something we need to look at in the future.”
Osborne said he wishes the authors of the 1977 city-county charter “had just consolidated the right way” back then but they didn’t. Two years later, he said, the Montana Legislature enacted laws to protect rural fire departments.
It will likely take the courts, Osborne said, to sort everything out.
He said paid firefighters “will do our best” on a new Fire Advisory Committee but he doubts it will settle key differences.
“I’d love to be optimistic and say yes, that could possibly happen,” Osborne said. “The truth of the matter is that this argument and relationship — bad relationship — has been festering for 47 years.”
Gallagher’s Views
Gallagher said the consultants have now agreed to have someone present the final independent study and its findings to the council, as the contract requires.
“If they weren’t willing to do that, then it (the study) does nothing for our community,” he said. “They need to come and present the independent findings.”
Gallagher said he hasn’t seen a final report from the study and it has been months since he looked at the draft version.
“I think there was stuff in there saying there needs to be better coordination between the paid and volunteer (departments) and that we have a lot of resources available to us and a lot of equipment, but I don’t know how it specifically states that,” he said.
In two separate interviews, Gallagher emphasized one point:
“I just want to make this clear — I am not trying to get rid of any volunteer fire departments. They are incredibly important,” he said.
But Gallagher said there have been tensions for years over how much authority the director of fire services wields and “how everything works” given differences in the local charter and state law and how those are interpreted.
He agreed that new members were needed on a Fire Advisory Committee “to bring new blood into this and maybe a new perspective,” and said talks were planned this week on getting the committee re-established.
Gallagher said the volunteers have gotten an attorney involved, the County Attorney’s office is weighing in and it will likely take legal opinions to determine “how paid and volunteer are going to coordinate together.”
But he agreed with Brothers’ statement that both are needed, saying Butte-Silver Bow is too big for one paid department to handle.
“We need to have the volunteers and we need to be able to coordinate those services between the paid and the volunteers,” Gallagher said.
Mike Smith is a reporter at the Montana Standard with an emphasis on government and politics.
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