Silton fire chiefs fired amid dispute with village council

Concerns about a lack of fire services northeast of Regina are burning high.

The Silton Fire Department is closed temporarily after Silton council removed Corey Coons as the volunteer fire chief, as well as Trevor Leggett as the deputy fire chief on Monday.

Coons said the decision has taken a toll on him.

Read more: 

• Ashes In the Alley: Regina woman fears North Central fires might spread to her home
• Sask. teen girls encouraged to apply for firefighting experience camp
• ‘Guardians of the North’ TV series featuring Sask. firefighters returns for fourth season

“It has been extremely hard on me. I didn’t think it would affect me the way it is. I’ve had minimal sleep for the past few days, and recently lost seven pounds. So it’s a hard thing to handle, more so the not being able to respond to the community and the large safety concerns that I had both for the department members and now for the community as a whole,” Coons said.

Coons said he wasn’t given a reason for his removal, but it came just days after he suggested a new governance model for the fire department.

“There were multiple reasons for it that I provided in that proposal. Some of the main ones are that the department is somewhat unique in that we served seven different municipalities and one provincial park,” Coons said.

“Silton was the smallest or close to the smallest one of those areas, and I felt that a change in model would help with more transparency, and then it would also help with some buy-in from the other municipalities to work together to achieve a better fire service.”

Coons says the proposal came on top of an issue the department had been dealing with for some time regarding mould in the building where firefighters kept their gear and the firetruck.

The building — that he called the new fire hall, and the village called a storage building — was so humid, it was causing their gear to get mouldy.

He said they eventually called in a building inspector to look at the humidity issue, something Coons claimed Silton Council wasn’t happy with.

Silton Mayor Murray Wild said the decision to remove both the fire chief and deputy fire chief was due to an “inability to work with council anymore.”

“For the record, this was not taken lightly, and this was not a personal attack. But it had become what we felt was we were not doing our job if we allowed it to continue,” said Wild.

“Silton Council, of course, we’re being quite vilified by this. But had we not done something, I felt we weren’t serving our levy holders or our ratepayers. We weren’t doing them any justice; we had to make a change, and we did.”

Wild explained there was an “unpleasant discussion between two councillors and the fire chief and deputy fire chief last week.

He said the most recent issue that led to the decision to remove the pair came after Coons sent an email to those who pay into the fire department about the proposed changes to a regional governance model.

“They sent their proposal out to all the levy holders, and council knew nothing of it. So you need to start with your council first, and they have been contacting some of the levy holders — or councilors in different municipalities, some rural municipalities, some resort villages saying, “would you sit on the board of this?’ And that is way overstepping your bounds as the fire chief,” said Wild.

“When I found out that he (Coons) had sent this regional fire thing to all the levy holders — he can say he sent an email to us, but I had not seen it… I didn’t think I would be able to work around that again.”

Wild said he is not opposed to a new governance model for the fire department, which would have representatives from each community on the board overseeing the fire department, but he felt it was approached in the wrong way.

“I don’t know in what world that you can work to undermine a council and think that you’re going to skate along and have no issues.”

Wild said they have changed the padlock on the buildings where the firefighting gear is stored. As of right now, the Earl Grey Fire Department and the Lumsden Fire Department are getting called in to respond to fires in the communities that were previously supported by the Silton Fire Department.

For now, Wild explained that a former fire chief in Silton has been appointed to the job, but that likely won’t go into effect until about Sept. 15.

Coons said his concern with this, is that it will likely take a minimum of 30 minutes for firefighters from the neighbouring communities to respond to an incident.

“On top of that, we would have to keep in mind that the members need to drive to the hall, get dressed in their protective equipment, and move a very large apparatus down the road,” he explained.

“One of the major concerns I have with mutual aid agreements is this area isn’t their main focus. So if they do have something in their area specifically, that would likely take priority, so they may not be able to respond here.”