MOUNTAIN HOME, IDAHO — A fire chief is sending a message to his firefighters after stepping down from his post.
“Come together, rebuild the brotherhood that’s fractured right now, and move forward,” former Mountain Home Fire Chief Alan Bermensolo said.
The response to a fire back in February led to tension between the city of Mountain Home and its fire department, causing the fire chief to step down from his post.
KTVB sat down with Bermensolo and Mayor Rich Sykes. Both say the problem stemmed from a decision the chief chose not to make: a decision not to write-up and suspend a firefighter after they made a poor choice while handling a fire.
But both Mayor Sykes and Bermensolo say there are two sides to every story.
“This situation should not define our fire department and our city,” Bermensolo told KTVB.
He says it all started with the infamous ‘FedEx Fire’ on February 23 after a delivery truck went up in flames. Someone told the mayor that firefighters responding stole belongings from the scene.
“I, in good conscience, couldn’t sit there – knowing about something – and cover something up,” Mayor Sykes told KTVB.
So the mayor called Bermensolo into his office – who wasn’t there at the time of the fire. He told him to discipline whoever was involved.
We didn’t see eye to eye on that,” Bermensolo said.
Sykes says it is the fire chief’s job as a department head to send the message that taking something from the scene of a fire is never OK. He asked Bermensolo to sign a Notice of Proposed Personnel Action against one of his employees.
“I would have preferred a write-up and maybe a suspension,” Sykes added.
Bermensolo says he refused to sign it, and resigned.
After 38 years serving the community of Mountain Home, Bermensolo feels at peace with it now.
“It’s just unfortunate this turned out the way it did,” he added.
A difference in how to handle punishment – with two city leaders opposed.
“Breaks my heart that this is what it’s come to,” Mayor Sykes said. “They’ve been disciplined and I want this all to go away and we’re done with it.”
Bermensolo feels, to this day, that he punished the accused firefighter appropriately. He deserved an oral warning and nothing harsher, he says. The former fire chief says he wasn’t going to go on a witch hunt of accusing and questioning people based on secondhand information.
“These are fine, fine people,” he said about his firefighters. “People have asked me, what are you going to miss most about this? It’s the brotherhood, it’s the camaraderie.”
His message to the community of Mountain Home: Help the fire department heal.
“Let’s all move forward and close this up, rebuild that bond between the city and the firefighters,” Bermensolo added.
Mayor Sykes wholeheartedly agrees.
“We’re going to move forward and be better for it,” Sykes told KTVB.
The mayor says when the city heard about what happened the night of the ‘FedEx Fire’ they turned it over to the county prosecutor. That
investigation is over now, and Mayor Sykes tells us it wasn’t found to be a criminal act of theft or burglary because the prosecutor deemed it “salvage.”