Culture war: ‘The brotherhood of the fire department is long gone’
October 24, 2024 at 1:51 a.m.
An air of exhaustion filled the room as the heat of the night was extinguished, for better or for worse.
“The biggest shock of my life, when I got elected, was the fire department,” said Port Chester Trustee Phil Dorazio. “I thought you guys were a tight family…I thought you guys were cohesive and together. I’m sure when you’re fighting a fire you are, but it was a big shock to see this.”
He was speaking moments after the Board of Trustees made sweeping official changes to the fire department’s structure on Oct. 7. As dozens of volunteer firefighters filtered out of the trustees’ meeting once the deed was done—there with solid representation showing how controversial that night was—Dorazio continued to ponder: “how?” How did the Village and fire department get into this situation?
In July, the Public Employee Safety and Health (PESH) Bureau of the State Department of Labor cited the Village of Port Chester with the serious infraction of having inadequately trained leadership in the volunteer department. Twelve of the 24 active officers—referring to chiefs, captains and lieutenants—had not received Fire Officer 1 and/or ICS 200 (Incident Command Systems) training, a qualification to hold the position.
“It’s probably a lack of oversight on the Village’s behalf and the fire department’s behalf,” said Fire Chief Angelo Sposta during an interview on Wednesday, Oct. 23, explaining how a deficiency of such magnitude came to be. “We have a very unique makeup where captains and lieutenants are not sworn in by the Village, they’re elected on a company level. And I’m not blaming the companies, we haven’t done anything different than what we’ve always done. But there was no oversight.”
Historically and traditionally, the Port Chester Fire Department has been a self-governed arm of the Village that, celebrating its 200th anniversary last year, is older than the municipality itself. Stuart Rabin, the village manager, explained during an interview in his office that per state law, oversight of the department is the right and responsibility of the Board of Trustees—also considered fire wardens, the local terminology for fire commissioners—who in longstanding tradition have opted to have fire chiefs independently run firemanic operations.
The PESH citation, however, was a wakeup call to the Village. And at the Board of Trustees meeting on Oct. 7, they took back control they had always been privy to, adopting rules and regulations affiliated with volunteer service.
The pushback was palpable, bringing to light tension that goes far beyond the matter at hand while speaking to an overt divide about the changing and clashing culture within the fire department. The brotherhood, as members often call it, has taken on a narrative of Cain and Abel.
The world is changing; Port Chester is changing. Do the structure and traditions of the Fire Department have to change, too?
“It’s one of these things where this Village has so much potential on a lot of fronts,” Rabin said. “But it also has stuff that it’s been dragging for years that we’re lopping off or fixing. As long as we’re moving in the right direction and not perpetuating the bad practices, then I’ll take the tension and the problems when we adopt the new, right ones and have to deal with the old guard versus the new guard.
“That’s a better place for us to be than to be in a stagmire of doing the wrong thing all the time because that’s how we always did it. That’s not what we’re going to be.”
The Village takes control
“Believe me, with dynamite you could not have caused more damage than you already have,” Mike DeVittorio, a former fire chief, said that night to the Board of Trustees. In an interview the following week, he elaborated. It’s not about the rules but the implication.
The Board of Trustees adopted regulations codifying department standards. Largely, they outlined the specific training courses that must be completed to serve in officer positions and included a residency requirement for the chiefs. They also set forth rules regarding permissions to operate apparatuses and mandates that volunteers must submit their qualifications to the Village before getting elected to the leadership roles.
Most of the regulations went into effect immediately.
Rabin said it was necessary to ensure “the Board of Trustees are in the plumbing.” But some firefighters, particularly those with storied experience, see it as an overstep infringing on the department’s independence that puts a dooming strain on the volunteers.
“You have a volunteer organization where you have to understand your membership. You have to understand that we’re all human beings. You have to understand that people have families and jobs. Training is excellent, but you can’t do things like that,” said Bill Barnes with a finger snap. “My concern is the timeframe. The Village needs to embrace that we’re all volunteer firefighters, we do the best we can, and we don’t get paid. How we get paid is our satisfaction of doing community service.”
Barnes is a former fire chief who has been with the department for 51 years. He and DeVittorio raised concerns about timing—they would have liked to see a multiyear plan that ensures folks have time to get into competitive training class seats and outlines guidance for ambitious future leaders—but also the flexibility removed by the trustees in terms of qualifications. They, and other former chiefs who asked not to be named, emphasized countlessly that training is great—they’re “all for training”—but experience also matters.
“The Village is going to the extreme of saying: ‘We don’t care if you were fully trained when you joined,’” DeVittorio said. “They’re demanding that a guy who has 25, 30 years of experience goes back to do it all over again, which is absolutely ludicrous, and New York State has never said that it should be that way.”
“PESH is a recommendation,” he said—a loaded sentiment subject to debate.
When PESH cited the Village with a training violation, it referred to the Office of Fire Prevention and Control’s 2015 memo “Recommended Best Practices for Fire Department Training Programs.” It indicated the officers did not have the outlined training, or that of equivalence.
The memo states that it should be used as guidance—it is not intended to formulate mandates but rather a tool “useful in developing a training program that meets the intent of OSHA regulations.” DeVittorio, who is also the legislative chair for the Southern New York Volunteer Firefighter Association, said the mandate is about demonstrating competencies.
“There’s a lot of confusion about what’s recommendation and what’s law, it’s very hard to decipher. Since this whole thing started, I’ve spent 200 or 300 hours reading through this stuff,” Sposta said. “The Office of Fire Prevention and Control is a recommendation, their best practices. That’s what they consider to be a minimum baseline for what you need for each position. PESH and OSHA are law. And the way I understand it is, PESH has accepted best practice as the law, and they’re able to issue violations.”
PESH enforces the rules of OSHA, he said. And whether there is flexibility in meeting compliance, the Village of Port Chester’s new mandates are rigid.
The former fire chiefs, largely, are concerned about the Village’s reach into the department’s operations.
“We can manage ourselves. We’ve done it for over 200 years. We’ve had good people, we’ve had bad people, we’ve dealt with it,” Barnes said. “When an organization changes from within, it’s going to flourish. When outside forces change it, it ceases to exist. I don’t think everybody understands the potential hardship of the resolution.”
“In the volunteer system, one of the keys to being a good officer, chief, senior member, is you want to make it conducive for someone to come around, you want to make it pleasant,” DeVittorio added, citing concern that already, fire agencies across the state are struggling with retention. “You don’t want a miserable place, a toxic work environment, which is what it’s become. You’re dependent on these people and their good will to show up.”
The Village taking control now, they said, opens the doors to more restrictions later.
“The reality is, there’s nothing in the fire department that is not the Village’s. They’re our trucks, they’re our buildings. We buy the gear, we pay for training,” said Rabin, added it’s also the Village’s liability. “The fire department is a department of the Village, and it’s going to be treated like the police department, code enforcement, the clerk’s office. They’re part of us, not separate.”
“What we’re clear about is, if you’re responding to an emergency, you need to be properly qualified and trained to take on the role of a responsible emergency responder,” he said. “Traditions that go into a company or history, that’s not operationally my concern. My concern is to make sure if there’s a call, there’s a response and there’s a resolution with as much life saved and property protected as possible.”
At the Oct. 7 meeting, numerous firefighters also addressed the trustees to voice support for the new mandates. Rabin noted that those firefighters, mostly younger in age, are the active volunteers who physically enter the burning buildings.
Their words and position, he said, should not be understated.
A vote of no confidence
Accusations, publicly, have been fired. The Port Chester Fire Department is blatantly divided—both over the mandates currently coming down and the general culture of the institution.
“I know it’s a culture shock, especially for a lot of our older members,” Sposta said. “And I’m in the middle of that. I’ve been here for 25 years. I’ve seen both sides of it. Our newer members, they don’t know the difference, because when they joined, they already had to do all this stuff. But the older members didn’t, because it wasn’t required.”
“But there’s division in getting people up to a common ground.”
One of the officers who lacks the training is John Storino, the first assistant chief who was anticipated to move into the head chief position in January. At the Oct. 7 Board of Trustees meeting, he put forth frustration that several others have echoed.
“If I’m not able to take charge of a call, when someone underneath me with less experience and time takes over, how would that make any of you feel?” he questioned. Education is taught and experience is lived, he said, and it’s a slap in the face to discount the firefighters with decades of the latter.
Notably, fingers—some publicly, several privately and many on social media—have been pointed heavily at Sposta and second assistant chief Nick Melillo. The criticism varies, but it’s loud.
At the Board of Trustees meeting, Sposta’s authority was outwardly questioned. “This guy is picking sides,” Storino said of the chief. “Do you think any of us feel safe now to go into these buildings with our so-called brothers? The brotherhood of this department is long gone.”
The presidents of four Engine & Hose fire companies—Putnam, Mellor, Washington and Brooksville—even signed and sent a memo to the Board of Trustees requesting the removal of Sposta and Melillo from their positions.
The Sept. 29 letter, which the Westmore News received via a Freedom of Information Law request, was vague but poignant: the companies had passed votes of no confidence about the leadership for “their poor and fractured leadership of the PCFD and its members.”
“The concern I have with the votes is what exactly it stems from. It doesn’t seem like we have a firemanic issue,” Rabin said. “It seems to be connected with this tension we’re seeing. I would hope that everyone in the department would say their main focus is safety and security of the residents. There might be a philosophical difference about how to deliver those services.”
In some conversations, former chiefs who asked that their names be withheld spoke to a culture of bullying and mismanagement. They questioned whether wise financial decisions have been made and expressed outrage over a Sept. 11 incident where fire department rigs traveled out of state for a photo opportunity revolving around the site of the World Trade Center.
Others referred to a lack of vision and buy-in.
“Everyone has a different thought process, but your department is your department,” Barnes said. “Your department is your family. You can’t be above them, you’re with them, you’re the leader. You want people to look at a chief and say, ‘that’s the chief.’ It’s respect.”
“If you’re a leader, you need a vision. A short-term, middle-term and long-term vision,” he continued, stating he feels the way the PESH violation has been handled is a Band-Aid solution to a bigger problem, which speaks to issues of leadership. “We need to have a system where we can develop our future leaders. The challenges of being an officer, to be a firefighter, have changed. The world isn’t going to change us, we have to adapt to the world.”
When Sposta began his term in January 2023, he did so as one of the youngest chiefs in the fire department’s history. If Melillo becomes chief, he’ll be even younger. The tensions rising now, Sposta said, seem to represent a generational feud.
“I do think there’s an element of ‘you don’t tell me what to do, I’ve been here longer than you,’” Sposta said. “But it’s gone too far. I’m hated right now. They went after my family on Facebook, talking about my wife and my kid. It’s out of control; it’s out of line. It’s sick.”
Was the mere act of PESH getting called a malicious act speaking to the divide?
“With older members, our problems were our problems, and we dealt with them,” DeVittorio said. “The younger people have taken to PESH and have weaponized it against people they don’t like.”
At the Oct. 7 meeting, some volunteers actively referred to the PESH incident as a witch hunt against Storino.
“Someone called in an anonymous PESH complaint. It’s like a whistleblower thing, we’ll never know who did it,” Sposta said. “PESH has before been used as a weapon. There’s no doubt about it. I don’t know if that’s happening now, we have no way of proving it. But regardless of why they were called, they found deficiencies and we really don’t have a choice but to work through it.”
Ultimately, Sposta said, he knows blowback is coming his way because of the changes being implemented due to the PESH investigation. But “anyone who was in my position would be doing the same exact thing,” he said. “They’d have no choice.”
The consequences, if no action is taken to remedy the training deficiencies, could get worse. Rabin said he fears the state will follow up and would be more than happy to make an example out of the Village with exorbitant fines. And Sposta noted he was told the Village could be criminally prosecuted if something happened now that they’ve been notified.
A plan for the future
How the Port Chester Fire Department got into this situation is complicated. Aside from oversight concerns, different stories have floated around about whether training opportunities properly were made available to firefighters.
But the bigger question is what happens moving forward.
Since PESH cited the Village, Rabin and Sposta said they’ve been working with the state and county to line up training opportunities for the officers. No one can lead an emergency response until they’ve attained the certifications, Rabin emphasized, but currently, due to those collaborations, nine volunteers are receiving the training to rectify the violations. The course will be completed at the end of November.
In the meantime, “we have members that already have the qualifications stepping up as officers in the interim,” Sposta said. “The bickering, the nonsense and the rumors, it doesn’t help this situation. But I think once members get out of the class and get back into those roles, that will help.”
Storino, both Sposta and Rabin confirmed, is signed up for the classes he’ll need to serve as chief. It’s unclear if he’ll be able to complete them by Jan. 1, when the new chiefs are sworn into office. The village manager said it’ll be up to the Board of Trustees to decide how to move forward until June 30, which is when a deadline has been agreed upon with PESH to get everyone up to speed.
Additionally, for the sake of clarity in creating a path for firefighters moving forward, Sposta put together a training plan that directly guides volunteers in moving up the ranks. The document details specific courses needed to achieve different firefighter ranks.
Despite the animosity, “we have so many people trained, and that’s significant,” Rabin assured, stating the Village still has one of the largest forces in the county. “The only thing we’re dealing with is the brass aspect, not the rank and file, which I guess is the better problem to have.”
The Port Chester Fire Department has over 300 volunteers on paper, Sposta said. Of those, 87 are qualified for interior firefighting, and another 50 can battle flames from the exterior.
“They’re all committed to firefighting,” he said. “They show up, do what they have to do, and they’re adequately trained. And they’re going to keep coming out no matter what. There’s a lot of chatter, but when a job needs to be done, those members are there doing it. And we still have new members coming in every month who will be up to speed with the standards.”
As for Sposta, he’s ready to be done.
“This was not the way I wanted to end my chief’s term,” he lamented. “This has been brutal.”
The PESH violations came as a shock, Sposta said, but the animosity he’s experienced in turn has been even worse.
“I wish everyone would get on board and get through this as a group,” he said. “I’ve had enough. I’m burnt out, from the disrespect. I’ve had plenty of chiefs I worked under that I liked and didn’t like; I’ve never seen so much disrespectful stuff happen that’s happening right now.
“We’ve been through a lot of bad things over the years, from line of duty deaths to firing of the paid staff,” he continued. “We’ve been through it, and we’ll get through it. We didn’t make it to 200 years by not being able to survive. We’ll survive, it’s just an ugly time right now.”
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