Valley Mills' 25-year fire chief submits resignation

However, the information request did not originate from the Tribune-Herald, the city council has not accepted Fire Chief David Fisk’s resignation of the chief position he has held for 25 years, and Fisk said he wants to resign because he plans to sue the city over a sewage leak affecting a house he owns, unrelated to fire department finances.

“The day after we gave him (Fisk) that information request about fire department finances, he turned in his letter of resignation,” Valley Mills Mayor Joshua Thayer said Friday.

Valley Mills City Hall and at least one council member received a public information request in an email dated April 16 for annual financial audit reports on the volunteer fire department from 2015 to 2022. The request claims to be from the Tribune-Herald and also includes an allegation that poor financial record keeping created opportunities to steal fire department money.

It was actually emailed from an account with Protonmail.com and not from an official Tribune-Herald email account. It does not include a name of a Tribune-Herald employee, and does not include contact information associated with the Tribune-Herald.

Proton Technologies, AG, of Geneva, Switzerland provides free encrypted email through Protonmail.com.

During a special called city council meeting Monday that included an opportunity to discuss and take action on the chief’s resignation, and an executive session for a pending lawsuit over utilities, the city council did not accept Fisk’s resignation.

Addressing the council in a three-minute public comment before the vote on his resignation, Fisk spoke about many topics, none of them apparently directly related to his resignation.

He spoke about a mentally challenged individual who died in December 2021 in a house he now owns. Fisk implied that a sewage leak under the house cased the man to die.

Fisk said Friday that it was his lawsuit against the city over that sewage leak that the council discussed in executive session. He said the Highway 56 Lift Station which pumps sewage for the Valley Mills water utility has caused a leak under a house he owns near the station and that he will sue the city to get it to make repairs.

He also spoke to the council Monday about city-provided vehicles for officials, paying for gas and repairs to fire department vehicles out of his own pocket, and a council member telling him to illegally put dyed diesel, a type of tax-exempt fuel available for limited uses, in firetrucks.

A gavel banged on each of those topics, and the mayor asked Fisk to move on and speak about his resignation.

Fisk gave up the microphone, and the council considered a motion to accept his resignation. No one seconded the motion, so it died.

Fisk said he had turned in all of his fire department equipment and would no longer serve the city.

On Friday, the mayor and the city administrator both said Fisk’s resignation came the day after the city passed him the information request for eight years of fire department audits.

Fisk said Friday that he resigned because of a conflict of interest with the city over his lawsuit for the leaking sewage and not because of fire department finances.

“The person who keeps those records does a very thorough job,” Fisk said of the fire department’s finances.

Neither the Valley Mills city attorney, nor the treasurer of the volunteer fire department responded immediately to questions about fire department financial recordkeeping.

The Valley Mills City Council has called another special meeting for 6 p.m. Monday to possibly take action on the Highway 56 Lift Station. Mayor Pro Tem Curtis Wiethorn said Friday that the council would spend much of Monday’s meeting in executive session with the city attorney discussing the lift station.

Regardless of what the facts are surrounding Fisk’s resignation, the public information request falsely claiming to be from this newspaper is problematic, Tribune-Herald Editor Steve Boggs said.

“Everyone has a right to look at public records. There’s no need to masquerade as a Tribune-Herald reporter to gain access to them,” Boggs said. “Unlike whoever submitted this request, our reporters identify themselves by name and provide contact information.”