Audience members listen in the gym at Church by the Lake as municipal candidates discuss the issues

The continuing turmoil within the Sackville fire department came up repeatedly Tuesday as residents questioned the candidates running for seats on Tantramar Town Council during a forum attended by about 200 people at the Church by the Lake in Middle Sackville.

“I’m Ward 3 and by my count, we have more than half of the current council running for re-election,” said Dodie Perkin referring to five of the eight candidates in her ward which includes most of the former town of Sackville.

“Over the past few years, the fire department, for example, has gone into disarray and the council seems to be helpless to deal with that,” she said.

“So as members of the current sitting council who have gone through this, why should we trust you and why should we vote for you?” Perkin asked.

New investigation

Ward 3 Councillor Michael Tower

“One reason you can trust me is that I speak clearly and I try to provide transparency,” said incumbent Ward 3 councillor Michael Tower.

“When it comes to the fire department, I think that we finally set the right things in motion and it’s going to take time to get the answer and this new council is going to have to be the one that steps up and deals with it,” Tower added, referring to the town’s announcement in January that it had hired a Saint John law firm to investigate allegations of a toxic work environment within Sackville Fire & Rescue.

Tower added later that the town had also done the right thing by hiring a new director of protective services to oversee the three Tantramar fire departments as well as bylaw enforcement, emergency management operations and animal control.

Incumbent Ward 3 councillor Bruce Phinney said he could be trusted because everyone knows he always speaks his mind.

“I supposedly broke the code of conduct three times, allegedly, and I lost my pay and benefits for a few months,” he said, adding in response to a later question, that he had tried to persuade his council colleagues to meet with the 12 firefighters who turned in their pagers in January to hear their grievances firsthand.

“But we seem to be a divided council,” Phinney said, referring to council’s decision not to meet as a body with the 12 volunteers.

Josh Goguen explained that as a first-term councillor, he was inexperienced and naive expecting, at first, that he would receive accurate information.

“I trusted administration, I trusted my colleagues. Unfortunately, that’s not how it was,” he said, adding later that as soon as he learned about the 12 firefighters turning in their pagers, he arranged to meet with them to find out what was going on.

“We want to make sure that the [workplace] investigation is done correctly and right, so we don’t have to deal with this come another election cycle,” he said.

‘Complicated’ issues

Ward 3 Councillor Allison Butcher

Councillor Allison Butcher said she was on council in 2021 when it commissioned the Montana Consulting Group to conduct a workplace assessment of the Sackville fire department.

“I thought that what came out of that would be a solution and thought we were working towards it,” she added, “and when we found out it wasn’t, we are working and it does seem like it’s slow. I can tell you, we’ve put in many, many hours.”

Current Mayor Andrew Black, who is running for a council seat in Ward 3, said the fire department situation “is way more complicated than what people out in Tantramar believe.”

He said he agreed the investigation into working conditions in the fire department needs “to finish up so that we’re not back in this again for another two years, three years, four years, five years. That can’t happen.”

Mayoralty candidate Sabine Dietz said later she agreed with Black that the fire department issues are complex.

“I think it is very simplistic to take one side over the other and I think council is doing the right thing now by commissioning another report,” she said.

Mayoralty candidate Sabine Dietz

Dietz suggested that council should be conducting regular performance evaluations of its only employee, the Chief Administrative Officer (CAO).

“That’s how we catch whether anything is wrong. [I’m] not saying there’s any wrongdoing or mistakes, but that’s how we catch it,” she said, adding that people should not be accusing anyone of wrongdoing.

“We’re not a negative community,” she said. “It makes all this very negative and it is highly complex and complicated.”

Former Sackville Councillor Ken Hicks, who is running for a seat in Ward 2, said the turmoil in Sackville Fire & Rescue is a symptom of a bigger problem.

“That problem is a lack of transparency. Information is being bottlenecked at the CAO’s desk, leaving both council and the public in the dark,” he said.

“We are paying for reports and investigations that we’re not allowed to see,” he added, referring to the $31,500 Montana report which has never been made public.

“I’m running to break that cycle,” he said.