By QUINTON SMITH/YachatsNews.com
WALDPORT — The call came at 11:43 a.m. Saturday – a woman near Range Drive in Waldport was struggling to breathe.
Central Oregon Coast Fire & Rescue firefighter/paramedic Jo Bartling and firefighter/EMT John Townley got to her house in less than 4 minutes and asked for backup from the Yachats and Seal Rock fire departments.
Shortly after Bartling and Townley arrived the woman stopped breathing. The two COCF&R firefighters brought her back to life and a Pacific West ambulance raced south from Newport to whisk her away to the hospital.
“If her family wasn’t there to call 9-1-1 she would have died,” Townley told YachatsNews later that afternoon. “It was my third save.”
But what if there were no firefighter/paramedics in Waldport to respond to emergencies?
That’s what 3,233 voters in the Central Oregon Coast Fire & Rescue District are deciding this week. But they may not fully realize it as they vote whether to recall two board members elected just 12 months ago.
On the surface, the wording on the recall ballots seem narrowly focused and technical. The question asks if Todd Holt and Kathryn Menefee should be removed from the fire board over allegations they violated multiple sessions of the state’s laws governing open meetings and executive sessions.
But the real question before voters is if they want the fire department to continue as it is currently led and staffed.
If Holt and Menefee remain on the board after ballots are counted June 7, they will likely join with the third new member of the board, Buster Pankey, to fire chief Jamie Mason — as the three intended to do during a March executive session before taking their lawyer’s advice and backing off.
If Mason is sent packing, then the district’s six paid firefighters – including Bartling and Townley — and 12 volunteers have also vowed to leave.
“If Chief Mason gets fired, I will no longer be here,” said Bartling, who like most COCF&R staff has job offers – often with recruiting bonuses or higher wages — waiting from other agencies or ambulance companies desperate for qualified staff. “I’ve worked for six chiefs in my career and he’s the one I want to work for.”
“There will be people setting their badges down if the chief is forced out,” firefighter Cody Johnson told YachatsNews. “A large majority of us will quit on the spot.”
The same holds true for the district’s 12 volunteers, said Rick Booth, the head of the district’s volunteer association.
“If our district votes that they should stay — in the face of our ‘no confidence’ vote last month — people will walk away,” said Booth, who is also a chaplain for coastal fire and police departments, head of South Lincoln Resources and a member of the Waldport City Council. “We don’t want to lose the chief. It would be a great disservice to the community.”
Controversy and turmoil in the district is nothing new.
The district has had four permanent or interim chiefs the past eight years and suffered for three years under the mismanagement of former chief Gary Woodson, who was finally relieved of his duties in December 2020 after an investigation into sending pornography to employees.
It’s also not the district’s first recall. In 2016, longtime board member Ray Woodruff resigned rather than face a recall election over the board deciding to give up the district’s unprofitable ambulance service.
Holt and Menefee did not take that route, instead asking voters to decide — at a cost of $6,000 for the special election — whether they should stay or go.
Campaigned against former board
Holt, Menefee and Pankey ran for the board in May 2021 after criticizing the previous board’s oversight of Woodson, delays in remodeling the Tidewater station, the condition of a rarely used station in the remote community of Five Rivers, and the goal of finding a new home for the district’s main station outside the tsunami zone in downtown Waldport.
Pankey, who also sits on the Port of Alsea board, ran unopposed for the fire board. Holt defeated Peter Carlich — who is the chief petitioner of the recall — by five votes. Menefee defeated two others for her board seat, despite her husband’s $1.1 million racial discrimination lawsuit against the district for his dismissal from the department in 2018.
At their first meeting last July, Holt, Menefee and Pankey quickly took control of the five-member board, electing Pankey as chair, Holt as treasurer and Menefee as secretary.
But by the time they took office last July, Mason had held the chief’s job for four months after firefighters and volunteers testified that as interim chief he was revitalizing the department, re-starting training and getting equipment and stations back in order.
“All of us want to stick around in the environment that Chief Mason has created,” Johnson said.
Since then, Pankey has struggled to communicate with Mason or office administrator Wendy Knudson over such basics such as monthly agenda items, board training, and for months has not responded to emails sent via the district’s email system.
“We go into these board meetings waiting to be blind-sided,” Mason told YachatsNews.
The three have stopped using district email for board business, Mason and Knudson say, leaving them and others to assume they are using personal email to communicate with each other, which is likely a violation of state law against “serial” meetings.
Pankey, Holt and Menefee declined to schedule in-person board training last summer offered by the district’s insurance carrier, the Special District’s Association of Oregon, and only Menefee has completed one module of the SDAO’s online training, according to district records. The district gets discounts on its insurance if board members complete the training.
Since March and after the recall signatures were verified, two subsequent board meetings have been short, perfunctory affairs.
The three did not attend the one and only meeting of the district’s 10-member budget committee May 12. But the committee — with five citizen members and two fire board members — had a quorum and was able to recommend the budget for board approval June 16 — the first scheduled board meeting after the results of the recall election.
September blowup
After a relatively quiet few months after they took office, Holt, Menefee and Pankey were involved in a very contentious public board confrontation last September with Mason and Erich Knudson, the district’s maintenance officer. It started over what the three found were poor conditions at the Five Rivers outpost, but then devolved into shouting matches, a request to discuss the Knudson’s side business with Information Station in executive session, and other issues.
After pushback the next month from firefighters and the public, the three said they would try to improve their tone in public meetings.
But that apparently just pushed their discontent underground.
Pankey and Holt have told others around Waldport they want to replace Mason with Will Ewing, a former Toledo and Detroit-Idanha fire chief now under a two-year contract to oversee the Seal Rock Fire Department.
A new Seal Rock board wants to re-negotiate or cancel an agreement between the two departments to share personnel and equipment. Pankey and Menefee – without Mason’s operational input – had been representing the Central Coast board in those discussions until board turmoil this spring put talks aside until the summer.
In the meantime, the COCF&R board – with support from its three newest board members – agreed with Mason’s plan to hire two firefighters on temporary contracts so that its district did not have to rely on Seal Rock personnel for responses.
Since Ewing took over, Seal Rock has lost three of its four paid firefighters and is paying volunteers or firefighters from other districts to cover shifts, often with one person.
“I can’t speak for others, but I will not work for Will Ewing,” said Townley, who left COCF&R for a year to work under former Seal Rock chief Tom Sakaris before Sakaris was fired by the new Seal Rock board last October. “We spent so many years battling Woodson here and now we just want to do our job. I like working for Chief Mason. I know a quality leader when I see one. He’s demanding. He’s fair.”
Unsure of intent
What is not clear so far is what Holt, Menefee and Pankey want to do if the two survive the recall election. Holt and Menefee declined to talk to YachatsNews for this story.
In a statement printed on each recall ballot, Menefee said when she was elected “the community was looking for change” and – like Holt – said the recall was started by a “small group of people.”
Holt and Menefee’s supporters created a website called “Put out the Fires Waldport” to disseminate information for them, but it has little information on it and its last post was May 16. The group also posts occasionally on the Tidewater Community Facebook page, which leads to back-and-forth mostly personal attacks.
Carlich and the recall group called “Save Our Fire Services” also has a website and posts regularly on Facebook. The recall group also mailed voters a flier urging the recall of Holt and Menefee, and are canvassing some Waldport neighborhoods to encourage a “yes” vote.
District staff – including Mason – just want the turmoil that weighs daily on their jobs to end. They contend the district is well on its way to correcting itself with major improvement in equipment, an operating station in Tidewater, regular and rigorous training, and that the district has been able to attract firefighters while others in Lincoln County struggle to keep staff.
“That’s the problem everybody has,” Mason told YachatsNews. “Nobody knows what their ultimate intentions are. They haven’t brought anything to the table.”
Booth, the chaplain, volunteer and city council member, say firefighters and volunteers voted unanimously last month to let Holt, Menefee and Pankey know they no longer had confidence in their ability to serve the district.
“If they don’t like something, go in and talk to the chief,” Booth said. “But to air it all on Facebook? That’s not how elected officials work. Ridiculing people in public? That’s not how things get done.”
If Holt and Menefee are recalled, then Pankey and fellow board members Reda Eckerman and Kevin Battles would appoint their replacements. But if they are recalled and Pankey also resigns, then Lincoln County commissioners would step in to appoint a third member to establish a board majority, which would then appoint the remaining two.
On Thursday, Eckerman — who has been restrained in meetings and in her public comments — broke her silence on the election, saying she took seriously the idea that firefighters and volunteers would resign if Holt and Menefee kept their board positions.
Johnson says the recall is really about firefighters and volunteers asking for the public’s help to do their jobs.
“We look forward to coming to work and serving people,” he said. “But this weighs heavily on our morale. Every day we respond to calls for help – and this is our call for help.”
- Quinton Smith, a longtime Oregon journalist, is the founder and editor of YachatsNews.com and can be reached at YachatsNews@gmail.com