RFD1 vs. the city of Havre, a year-long saga

This year, the city of Havre and the Rural Fire District 1 board spent nearly a year fighting over a contract that allows the city of Havre to provide fire suppression services outside of the city, a fight that ended up being one of the year’s biggest stories.

The city fire department provides services in the district, basically a ring around the city limits.

The conflict has been years in the making, with the city repeatedly asking for changes to the agreement that would see fire codes in the region locally enforced for the sake of residents’ safety and that of Havre’s firefighters.

The conflict between RFD1 and the city truly began in December of last year when the latter announced that it was canceling the fire suppression services agreement in place effective in June of this year so a new agreement can be put in place.

Havre Mayor Tim Solomon said the 30-year-old agreement for Havre to provide fire suppression to Rural Fire 1 has nothing in it about enforcing fire codes in the area, and the city wanted a new agreement that included that.

Agreements between similar fire districts and city fire departments are fairly common, as rural areas like RFD1 often don’t have the resources to put together a full fire department, making it practical to contract certain services out to the cities they surround.

Indeed, while the area has many volunteer rural fire departments that can address grass fires, they are not trained or equipped to suppress structure fires.

Solomon said his desired goal was to have an agreement that made sure fire codes in the district were enforced for the sake of RFD1 residents’ safety, and the safety of the Havre Fire Departments firefighters, who are the only ones in the area trained and equipped to put out structure fires.

He said the existing agreement needed to be canceled at the end of the last fiscal year, June 30, so a new agreement could take force at the start of this next fiscal year. He said officially notifying the district six months in advance gave them time to renegotiate a new contract, and that’s what they expected to happen.

However, the ensuing conflict would take far longer than that.

Restructuring the RFD1 board

Before any of that could be addressed, the RFD1 board would go through a massive restructuring by the Hill County Commission.

At a meeting in January, Hill County Commissioner Diane McLean said that the Rural Fire District 1 board had not responded to the commissions requests for minutes, treasurer’s information and meeting logs and the commission planned to take action to disband the board, as it appeared at the time to be more or less nonfunctional.

This opinion was shared by her fellow commissioner Mark Peterson.

“My personal opinion is this board has left us with no choice but to seek some sort of formal action to disband the board,” Peterson said at the time. “They are holding illegal meetings, they are not providing documentation and have not provided documentation to the county commissioners for several years. I’m going to propose that the commissioners try and contact Hill County Attorney Karen Alley over the next couple days to see if we can’t start some sort of action. We can’t allow a board to continue to do nothing and collect tax dollars.”

The restructuring of the board began in earnest early in February at another meeting held by the commission to figure out what they can do with a board it said is is not operating and upholding the standards of an elected board.

The three remaining board members did not attend the meeting. 

Then-Hill County Attorney Karen Alley said the board cannot be disbanded, but the members could be recalled.

Two board members had resigned by the time of the meeting. 

In March, the Hill County Commission appointed Courtney Tait to the board and by April the board had a new chair in Steve Jamruszka and a new secretary in Susan Tharp.

The new board agreed to hold regular meetings every second Tuesday of the month at 11 a.m. in the Timmons Room of the Hill County Courthouse.

Looking at a new agreement

By May, the new board had started looking into the agreement with the city and addressing their demand for fire code enforcement.

“I have reviewed more regulations than I ever thought I wanted to and I’m not done yet,” Jamruszka said in a meeting in May. “At this point, I have met with Mayor Tim Solomon and we exchanged some information, questions, comments and concerns. He gave me some documents. I do have more information that I am going to request. I’ll do that via a letter from the board to him.”

By that time the agreement was going to be terminated in 45 days, and Solomon said the city would be willing to grant the board some leeway given that this incarnation of the board was fairly new, as long as they committed to working toward an agreement that included fire code enforcement in RFD1.

“There’s probably some latitude to that if we see a substantial move forward on who’s going to and how it’s going to be enforced as far as some of the fire codes out in that area,” Solomon said at the meeting.

Solomon impressed upon those present that local enforcement of fire codes is necessary to keep people safe and there are new buildings going up with serious violations.

“No one’s enforcing fire code out in that area now and they’re building new facilities that don’t meet any fire codes,” he said. “We’re not interested in suppression if we don’t know who’s going to enforce the fire code. We’re looking for who’s going to step up and do that at the county level.”

However in June the city and the RFD1 board hit an impasse.

Board members said, based on their interpretation of the Montana Code Annotated, the board does not have any enforcement power.

“The way I understand it, the enforcement’s already taken care of by the Department of Labor and the fire marshal. I don’t think, personally, that we’re in a position to appoint anybody to do any enforcement whatsoever, I think that’s already taken care of by the Montana Annotated Code,” board member Courtney Tait said.

By that time, Jamruszka had also requested in a May 26 letter to Solomon to have the current fire suppression agreement reinstated or extended for a year.

If a new agreement or extension was not in place, the resulting impact on residents in RFD1 would be an increase in fire insurance costs, Tait said during the June meeting of the board. 

“(And) the city’s not going to get any more money out of us,” Tait added.

Solomon and Havre Fire Chief Mel Paulson said at the time that if the agreement was allowed to expire the city would likely still respond to fires in RFD1 but the district would get billed directly.

Jamruszka said in the letter that, based on his research of Montana law, it was in the best interest of both the city of Havre and Hill County to continue the agreement from 1993, but the city did not budge.

Solomon said the letter did not address his concerns that no one has been enforcing fire codes and structures are being built within the district. The city does not have a problem with providing fire suppression, he said, unless the city doesn’t know who will enforce the fire code, he said.

He reiterated that at a meeting in June.

“We’re asking for a new contract to be presented to us, and it needs to address the enforcement and that is what we’re asking,” Solomon said.

City grants extensions

Following a sometimes-heated conversation at the meeting, Solomon encouraged the board to speak with an attorney.

The board then asked for an extension which Solomon said that he was open to so long as the board meets with an attorney.

A week later, the RFD1 Board approved a new agreement to be submitted to the city which included a memorandum of understanding which would have been entered into July 1 of this year. Jamruszka said during a meeting that the memorandum addressed the city’s concern about code enforcement.

In the memorandum, Jamruszka cited Montana code stating that the state fire marshall’s office will report and enforce fire issues and that the state Department of Labor and Industry Building Codes Bureau has jurisdiction of cities, counties and towns that do not have inspection programs certified by the bureau.

“It’s the Department of Labor and the fire marshal, state fire marshal’s office that is responsible for investigation and compliance,” Jamruszka said during a meeting.“ ... So, at this point, there is enforcement, and the city either doesn’t want to partake in that, or they want to do something different and I’ve not heard back what they want to do.”

In response, Solomon said Montana law does give the district the power to enforce fire codes.

“There definitely are sections that they have authority to enforce to take care of the district,” Solomon said. “There’s buildings being built that aren’t meeting (code) and that’s what we’ve been discussing for a couple of years now.”

Paulson also weighed in in an interview with Havre Daily News, talking about the importance of meeting fire code and code enforcement as well as a number of other issues in RFD1.

“One of the things in the county besides fire code is that we don’t know and we’re not notified of any building that’s going up and what it’s potentially being used for. So we’re responsible to go out and suppress that fire but we don’t know what we’re going into,” Paulson said.

He said the department does inspections in Havre to get familiarized with buildings, adding that every business in Havre has a pre-plan so the department knows what a building has in it such as flammable liquids and other hazards, but that isn’t the case in Rural Fire 1, a fact that has already led to some dangerous situations.

“One of these buildings had 10,000 gallons of oil stored behind the building that was on fire and we didn’t know that. And that became a big problem,” he said. “Had that been in the city limits, we would have been aware of it and been able to build a tactic to handle that.”

Secondarily, Paulson said the impact of no deal becomes financial.

“If there’s no fire response … there’s a lot of places that would be uninsurable,” he said. “Businesses would be uninsurable. If there’s no response at all, not just that the insurance goes up, but that their insurance companies can’t insure them.”

The city, however, was not the only entity concerned about this ongoing issue. Tait expressed concerns at the time that rural departments fight grass fires, not structure fires, due to training and lack of equipment.

The public was also beginning to follow the situation more and more closely, with more and more people showing up to these meetings.

By the end of June as the deadline loomed, Solomon had seen the agreement proposed by RFD1 and said it didn’t address the city’s concerns about enforcement and would not even be considered.

Solomon did, however, grant an extension to the board through July 15 to give them more time to sort the problem out.

Disagreement on enforcement continues

At a meeting shortly before that extension ran out community member Arleen Rice, one of an increasingly large number of Hill County residents concerned with this issue implored the two entities to reach some kind of temporary agreement.

“I am not comfortable going one day past the 15th without some kind of working agreement here, and I do not want to see this can kicked down the road. We gotta be big people here and come to an agreement,” Rice said.

Jamruszka asked for another extension and, after some argument, Solomon gave the district until the end of July.

Tait had asked Solomon for a year, but this request was not considered.

Solomon again reiterated that the district needed to enforce fire codes, and the board again said enforcement was already taken care of by the state.

“I know your concern went up the line. It’s been resolved. And it’s coming back down. My statement is, the system works. What’s changed?” Jamruszka asked.

Solomon said it hasn’t worked and discussed specific buildings that aren’t meeting fire codes, but Tait put responsibility for that on the department.

“If the Havre Fire Department for 50-some years has been covering all this and you have these issues with the building codes and stuff, why hasn’t somebody from the Havre Fire Department got ahold of somebody at the Department of Labor and the fire marshal and said, ‘Look, this is our problem, you guys take care of it?” Tait asked.

Solomon said the fire department has done so, adding the city has asked the state to come in but that no one in the fire district has backed it up and he told the board the situation could be resolved if the board would just name someone, whomever the board wants, to be in charge of code enforcement and sign a new agreement.

Jamruszka and Tait disagreed with Solomon, saying the matter wasn’t as simple as naming a person to be in charge but that person had to be trained by the state and then approved by the Department of Labor, the health department and the fire marshal needed to be involved.

“There’s a lot of ramifications in what (Solomon’s) asking for,” Jamruszka said. “Liability is one, expense is another. Really, what he’s asking for is a whole ’nother layer of county government and the ramifications of everything involved in that need to be explored.”

“From day one, we have asked for an extension to be able to explore these options to clarify what we can or can’t do. That’s what the whole issue has been. We submitted the contract to them and it did have a memo of understanding,” he added.

Jamruszka criticized Solomon for not bringing the agreement they sent to him in June before the Havre City Council, but Solomon reiterated that because it did not address any of the city’s concerns it was not even up for consideration.

Possible end of services

Solomon and Havre Fire Chief Mel Paulson previously said the Havre Fire Department still would respond to fires in the district if the agreement lapsed, but would then bill the district directly rather than operating under the agreement, but as of that meeting, that no longer appears to be the case.

“At some point, it’s our liability going out into someone else’s area without even being invited. So it’s up to this board,” Solomon said.

Jamruszka asked Solomon if he was indicating there would be no response by the Havre Fire Department in the event of a fire in the district.

“You have control of fire district No. 1, so I don’t know if we’ll be invited out there or not or if you’re gonna find a private contractor or create your own department. I don’t know. That’s for you guys to make the decision,” Solomon said.

Jamruszka said the board was exploring options if the Havre Fire Department does not respond to fires in the district.

At the meeting he also said other members were being considered for removal from the Rural Fire District 1 board after missing multiple consecutive meetings.

The commission approved removing them from the board in a meeting not long after.

Apparent progress

After the deadline was extended again through August RFD1 finally seemed to be making progress toward addressing the city’s concerns and the board asked Solomon for more time to find an individual willing to fill the role and to get that person properly trained.

At a meeting early that month, Jamruszka said no one has been named to the fire code enforcement role and there is still a lot of coordination that needs to be done.

“There are clarifications that still need to be made. So at this point, fire marshal’s office still needs to be involved. And without approvals at that level for some of the things that we’re talking about, coordination and that sort of thing needs to still be worked out,” Jamruszka said during the meeting.

“At this point, we’re making progress,” he added. “We’re making some real progress, but we have not yet reached total agreement.”

Jamruszka said if enough progress is made regarding the fire suppression agreement, he would most certainly call a special meeting ahead of the board’s next monthly meeting set for Sept. 14.

When contacted by Havre Daily News for comment about the ongoing discussions, Solomon said both parties’ attorneys were communicating.

However, the board went silent after that, allowing the August deadline to pass without further public discussion, and 12:01 a.m. Sept. 1 RFD1 was left without fire suppression services.

Solomon said that morning that the city’s attorney dealing with the issue, Tyson Parman of Hi-Line Law, received an email from the attorney representing the Rural Fire District 1 saying its board is continuing to stick with the previous agreement and will not make changes requested by the city.

“We’ve already told them that’s not acceptable to us,” Solomon said at the time.

Hill County Commissioner Mark Peterson said that morning the county had contacted multiple fire departments, including Havre’s, requesting they cover the district as part of mutual aid agreements.

But Solomon said he was not aware of the Havre Fire Department having a mutual aid agreement with Rural Fire District 1. The department had been the entity providing primary fire suppression previous to that time.

Peterson said he and Jamruszka and Hill County Disaster and Emergency Services Coordinator Amanda Frickel met to set up a plan and called various fire departments including Havre’s, Bear Paw Volunteer Fire Department, Wild Horse Fire Department, Kremlin Fire Department and others to request a response to fires in the rural district under mutual aid agreements.

As Havre was the first responder to fires in the district until that time, whether any of those departments were designated as first responders or had mutual aid agreements with the district was unclear.

Solomon said no progress seemed to be being made on addressing the city’s concerns and the city was no longer willing to cover an area where fire codes are not enforced.

“We haven’t heard anything from the board so we don’t know what we are doing,” he said. “ ... We’re not wanting to continue putting our firefighters and the public in danger for not putting codes out there.”

He reiterated that all the city wants is for RFD1 to appoint a fire chief to make sure codes are enforced and if that is done the city will again work with the district.

“We’re definitely willing to negotiate,” he said.

Paulson said, after 26 years of protecting life and property to fire, it’s difficult to consider not responding.

“It’s tough,” he said. “It’s a tough situation.”

Volunteer fire departments weigh in

The situation came to a head shortly after, in a meeting between RFD1, the city, the rural fire departments, and Hill County Disaster and Emergency Services Coordinator Amanda Frickel where the city gave the RFD1 board one final two-week extension after the board finally agreed to work toward naming a fire chief or and equivalent there-of.

Hill County Commissioner Mark Peterson said in the meeting that he and Frickel had met with the fire chiefs of the Bear Paw Volunteer Fire Department, Wildhorse Rural Fire Department and the Kremlin Rural Fire Department to see if they could cover RFD1 after the deadline passed and all three chiefs and Frickel showed up to voice their concerns about this arrangement which they said was dangerous to the people of RFD1 and themselves.

Bear Paw Volunteer Fire Department Fire Chief Josh Bebee said his department is trained and equipped for wild land fires, not structural fires, and asking them to take this on is unfair, and he added that this conflict needs to get sorted out now.

“We are not equipped to enter that (burning) building, we’re not trained to do any of that, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to send or ask any of my guys to ever go into a structure when it is not safe,” Bebee said. “We’re wildland. If you guys have got wildfires, we’ll gladly put them out, gladly, and as far as structures go if the city keeps doing them we’ll gladly supply water to them, but the liability and what is being asked of these rural departments, we can’t do it. You guys got people’s lives on the line ... I don’t know how we end this crap, but it needs to end, we need to figure this out.”

He said the arrangement effectively puts him in the position of either turning his back on RFD1 residents or his firefighters and their families.

“If it’s a fire chief that is needed for Rural 1, why can’t we put a job application out?” he said. “... We’re not playing with Legos here, these are people’s lives, and it’s not fair.”

Wildhorse Rural Fire Department Chief Shawn Rismon echoed Bebee’s concerns and also brought up the matter of response time.

“I mean, my closest truck is 16 miles away. Granted that truck is usually in my back pocket most of the time, but that's 16 miles," he said.

Kremlin Rural Fire Department Chief Kody Peterson said much the same.

Frickel, who attended the meeting virtually, went further, saying she supports the chiefs and believes putting all of this on them is irresponsible, and the way in which the matter was handled, effectively dumping the responsibility in their laps in a meeting Tuesday night was absolutely not OK.

"It was not professional in any manner at all," she said.

Frickel said this impasse needs to be resolved and a solution found.

"If you're just saying, Mr. Solomon, that all we need is a fire chief and you'll come to terms with the agreement, then let's find a fire chief, if that's all it's going to take," she said.

Jamruszka again said the board needs more time to research the ramifications of appointing a fire chief, and have concerns about the cost hiring someone and Tait said Jamruszka has spent hundreds of hours researching the topic and the board needs more time.

"I'm not at a point right now that I'm willing to make a commitment. ... I can't give you a contract without knowing what's going to be in the contract," Jamruszka said.

Solomon responded by saying it shouldn't take that long and the city can't just keep putting the matter off with extension after extension.

"We've told you what needs to be in the contract, it's been the same thing all along, we just want some enforcement. ... It doesn't take a whole lot of research for that, that's my problem. You keep dragging this out and ignoring the problem for the citizens out there. At some point it's gotta come to an end," he said.

He said state law dictates that rural fire districts need to, one way or another, provide fire suppression and fire code enforcement in their district, and the city's demand for that code enforcement is ultimately for the sake of RFD1 residents and firefighters who would be put in danger if codes are not enforced, a demand that has been effectively ignored.

Jamruszka said Solomon is making it sound like inspections and enforcement are not going on at all, and said they are already being done by the state, just not to Solomon's liking.

Solomon said again that the city had been asking for known violations to be addressed for years to no avail, as the state mostly handles inspections, not enforcement.

RFD1 board members also brought up their concerns about their ability to pay a fire chief.

Tait said the district doesn't have a lot of money to work with and finding and hiring someone would be difficult.

Jamruszka also said they won't be able to hire someone right away due to the difficulty in finding someone.

Solomon said the city's position hasn't been contingent upon getting someone hired, merely a commitment from the board that they would find someone to handle enforcement.

"All that the city has asked for, for the last three years, we've been to meetings with this board, with the past board, and asked for some enforcement along with suppression," he said.

Solomon said he's given out numerous ideas for how the board could handle the enforcement of fire codes including appointing a fire chief, contracting those responsibilities to the city, or providing that authority to the county fire warden.

He said any one of those solutions would solve the immediate problem, though he favors the appointment of a fire chief as it would solve a number of other issues the board has.

He said the city would be willing to do the work of the fire chief as long as the person doing it gets paid properly for their time.

Hill County Commissioner Diane McLean and the RFD1 board members claimed those alternatives to a fire chief were never presented to the board, but Solomon said he did so several times in previous meetings, and said there are viable options as long as the board is willing to pay whomever takes on those responsibilities.

Solomon said most of the responsibilities of the fire chief under the agreement between the board and the city are already contracted out the anyway, and their only major responsibility is to enforce fire codes.

Paulson said the RFD1 fire chief would spend most of their time making phone calls to the state, which handles the bulk of the work anyway.

"You know, sometimes they don't know that buildings are going up, so it's a matter of someone notifying them," Paulson said.

He said if the state fire marshal can't respond to a code enforcement situation the fire chief would be responsible for it, but for the most part the fire chief just helps the state do its job.

Solomon said, collectively, it is not a tremendous amount of work, considering there are only a few major violations a year, and, depending on how the board handles it, it wouldn't cost all that much money.

"$100 a month, and don't tell me you don't have that," he said.

Solomon said he would need to do some research to provide more exact figures on what a fire chief would cost, but he could probably have them by the end of the day as long as he has a commitment from the board that they will, one way or another, get someone local to enforce the fire codes.

He said even if the position ends up being more expensive than anticipated, the district can use the money they have to cover one year to several years of the fire chief's pay, giving them the time needed to go to the voters and ask for what they need in levies to cover the position permanently.

Tait asked Solomon what happens when the voters say no.

Solomon replied that's something they may need to deal with, and is a reality of local government.

Rismon suggested that when they advertise for the position it may be prudent to describe the duties of the job and make it clear that its not really a leadership position like his or Paulson's.

He said when he heard RFD1 was possibly looking for a fire chief he assumed it was a job analogous to his and it may be a good idea for them not to advertise the position as fire chief just to make sure they don't scare anyone off.

Solomon said that is a good suggestion but ultimately immaterial without a commitment from the board that they would work toward getting someone local to take care of fire code enforcement.

Another extension and resolution

After a tense meeting Solomon offered an extension to the current fire agreement as long as the board made that commitment.

The extension was initially proposed to be 30 days long, but a member of the audience, a resident of RFD1 who would not identify herself, said she's had enough 30-day extensions and she wants this issue resolved immediately so she and her fellow residents can stop worrying about whether or not they're going to have fire suppression services.

The board and Solomon agreed on an extension to Sept. 15 and Jamruszka said this will be the final extension.

Frickel and Kody Peterson offered to enforce fire codes during those two weeks while the city and board working things out and Solomon said he'd be happy with that as long as they had the board's blessing, which was eventually given.

In an informal meeting a week later, Jamruszka and Solomon agreed on working language for a contract to provide fire suppression and the enforcement of fire codes to the district.

As it was an informal meeting, no document was signed, but Solomon said he was satisfied with the progress being made, and Jamruszka said he hopes to have the document signed by the end of the week.

Jamruska said the board didn't want to name a single person as fire chief, but he does have a plan for local enforcement of the fire codes that he hopes will work, provided it is feasible.

"I've got a framework in my head, but I've got to meet with some people," he said.

Solomon said the contract given to him must include language that gives Peterson and Frickel, or someone, local authority to enforce fire codes while Jamruszka works on this framework, but as long as that is the case, he's willing to sign the contract.

"That's all that we've been asking all along," he said.

Solomon and Jamruszka briefly discussed the possibility of contracting the work of fire chief out to the city, but the proposed price tag was too high for the latter.

Solomon said if the city were to take the job on, they would want to fully commit and take care of all duties of the fire chief in accordance with Montana state law, which they determined would require a half-time employee and cost about $50,000 per year.

He said he's not surprised the district doesn't like that number and said there are cheaper alternatives it can use to address the most important code enforcement issues in the district.

He said the city is not overly concerned with small issues like defective exit lights and minor code infractions, but is concerned about large violations they see going on in the district that they want addressed for the sake of everyone's safety, including their firefighters who provide suppression services.

Jamruszka said if the contract gains the support of the board and city all that's left is for the Hill County Commission and the state to sign off.

Frickel and Peterson said they'd meet with Jamruszka soon to hash out the specifics of their ongoing service to the district as fire code enforcers.

By Sept. 15 the issue at last appeared to be resolved.

The RFD1 Board had approved a contract to be sent to the city, and Solomon said he and the board were going back and forth on wording about the enforcement of fire codes.

He said it seems like they're on the same page for now and progress was being made, which would hopefully result in a signed contract before the 12:01 a.m. deadline first thing the next morning.

"I think we'll get there," he said.

RFD1 Board Chair Steve Jamruska said later that morning the city and board have agreed to the discussed language changes and the latter will be announcing a special meeting to adopt these changes officially.

After Jamruszka presented the new contract to the board, along with it's newest member Neil Larson, the board voted two to one to adopt the contract with Tait voting against and Larson and Jamruszka voting for.

After the board voted to adopt the contract Tait announced his resignation from the board effective that afternoon.

He said he believes the appointment of a fire chief is unnecessary and ill advised, calling it a waste of money the district cannot afford.

"I don't really think I'm gonna be a help to you guys. I think I'm only going to be a hinderance," he said.

Tait also criticized the handling of the whole affair with the agreement.

"This negotiation was extremely poorly handled, actually there wasn't a negotiation," he said.

Solomon said after a 911 meeting that day that it had never been a negotiation, that all the city is looking for is local enforcement of fire codes for the safety of the city's firefighters and the people of RFD1.

After the months of back-and-forth arguments between the city of Havre and Rural Fire District 1, the Havre City Council unanimously approved the new Fire Suppression Contract with RFD1.

At the meeting council members thanked Solomon for his work getting this agreement in place and for his patience.