INSIDE

Board agrees to pay off debt

By Meg Olson

The commissioners of the Point Roberts fire district are grudgingly paying off debt acquired by the North Whatcom Fire and Rescue Service maintenance shop.

“I painfully move we pay the $16,000 as recommended by our attorney,” said commissioner David Gellatly at the September 14 board meeting. “We forwarded all the documentation to the lawyer and the long and short of it was he said we should pay it.”

The bill coming back to haunt current commissioners is a legacy left by former commissioners Jesse Lofquist, Don Frantz and John Fisher who in April 2003 signed a letter of agreement taking responsibility for 14.7 percent of the obligation for an unsecured line of credit to provide working capital for the NWFRS automotive and technical division. “I’m sure they did it in good faith and everything else,” said chief Bill Skinner. “It’s just one of those things that came back to haunt us.”

At that time the NWFRS shop not only maintained the vehicles for the three partners in the consolidated agency, one of them being fire district 5, but there were plans for it to become an income generator through contract mechanical and technical services for other districts. Instead the shop continued to lose money and in April 2005 the remaining partners in NWFRS dissolved the shop and in August the line of credit was declared in default.

Point Roberts left the partnership in December 2003, after the district got a whole new slate of commissioners who were skeptical of financial management at NWFRS. Current commission president Bill Meursing had indicated district 5 should not be responsible for debts incurred after they voted with their feet, but he bowed to the legal opinion of lawyer Brian Snure who wrote that under the terms of the 2003 agreement “the payment guaranty would apply regardless of the reason for the default, the timing of the default or the fact that the district is no longer a member of NWFRS.”

“I was afraid of that,” Meursing said.

Snure recommended that in future commissioners not pledge the district’s funds without more stringent conditions. “We need to basically do our homework better in the future,” said Skinner. Skinner added that this was not likely to be the end of bills from NWFRS. “I was told we could look at a total of about $25,000,” he said. “The other requests will be in relation to whether we have a responsibility for staff salaries and overhead in certain areas.” The state auditor found that the partners in NWFRS did not equitably share the costs of running the agency.

“Further requests would, of course, need to be followed with sufficient documentation,” Skinner said. “Their financial accounting wasn’t all that great so they’ve hired an outside accounting firm now to audit things.”