Nasonville could dissolve fire district
BURRILLVILLE – It remains unclear what will happen next, but residents of the Nasonville Fire District have voted to begin a process of undoing the incorporation of the district and pursuing what may follow.
A gathering of 42 district residents in the Nasonville Fire Station at 2577 Victory Highway Tuesday night voted 34 to 6 to begin seeking to dissolve the district originally incorporated as an independent fire district by the R.I. General Assembly in the 1940s, according to Fire District Department Committee Chairman Gerald Lapierre.
Lapierre said Wednesday that the district committee will meet next Tuesday night at 7 p.m. with its attorneys, Timothy Cavazza, for labor relations, and Michael Crane, the district’s general counsel, to discuss how to move forward with the district’s vote on dissolving the district.
“It was a vote to maintain what we are doing at this point, working with the Oakland-Mapleville Fire District but part of it was also to begin initiating the move to dissolve the district,” Lapierre said.
The vote taken Tuesday does not dissolve the district directly, Lapierre explained, but rather seeks to start the process that would lead to that action, whatever may be involved.
Although he could not personally outline the course that might taken in such a move, Lapierre said that future General Assembly action might be required to undo the district’s incorporation and the district’s legislative representatives, state Rep. Brian Newberry, (Dist. 48), and state Sen. Jessica de la Cruz (Dist. 23), also need to be contacted about that process.
The action taken by the district on Tuesday follows votes late last year
to lower the district’s taxation costs by eliminating all of its full-time and part-time firefighter staffing, including the job of Fire District Chief Joseph Bourquin. The votes taken came as a response to a proposal to settle a
new contract with the independently-operated district’s union firefighters that would have increased district taxes by 70 percent, according to Lapierre. Instead, the district voters opted to not approve a new contract and the firefighters were in turn laid off on Oct. 1 following expiration of the past contract agreement on Sept. 30.
A separate vote was taken to terminate Chief Bourquin without cause, eliminating all of the professional staffing, Lapierre said.
The district also had a number of volunteer firefighters that served on an on-call basis, but the group of 27 department members resigned en masse following layoffs of the professional staff.
Although the district has been seeking to find new volunteers in the interim, the day-to-day coverage of Nasonville emergencies has been relinquished to another of the town’s four independent fire districts, neighboring Oakland-Mapleville.
Oakland-Mapleville Chief Joseph Bertholic on Wednesday could not speak to the actions of the Nasonville District Tuesday night, but did confirm that his department has been providing full-time coverage for the village of Nasonville since October.
Oakland-Mapleville had been providing mutual aid to Nasonville for years, but has taken on all of the district’s calls since October.
“We are still answering their calls but they don’t have any people to respond,” Bertholic said of the now expanded role of coverage.
While some might foresee a move to merge the two districts into one as a result of the current situation, both Bertholic and Lapierre indicated no such move is currently under discussion.
Bertholic noted that at the moment the burden from Nasonville is only a small portion of his district’s calls. Nasonville represents ap-
proximately 12 to 15 of 60 calls handled by his department a month, he said.
Since beginning a campaign to find new volunteer firefighters, Lapierre said Nasonville has only found one, a Nasonville resident, to date. The effort has been undertaken during the winter months, he noted, and it is possible more maybe found in the months ahead. But he also did not rule out the possibility of Oakland-Mapleville taking over the district’s emergencies responsibilities on a permanent basis as the dissolution effort proceeds.
“There is a lot of talk about mergers in the town but nothing has been initiated as of yet,” he said. That may change in the future, he added. “My guess is that it may be considered when you consider that we have four independent districts in the town,” he said.
Newberry could not be reached Wednesday for comment about the legislature’s role in a dissolution of the Nasonville district and attempts to contact union representatives about the status of ongoing litigation regarding the district’s professional staff were also unsuccessful.