TOP SECRET

Part Two

The Head Correspondent for KOTL caught Northampton Fire Chief Brian Duggan in his office Monday morning, October 24. The chief sat on the opposite side of the reception room at the main fire station; I sat in the chair next to his secretary. This was my opportunity to ask him some questions about his work as an outside consultant for Municipal Resources Inc. (MRI) of Meredith, New Hampshire. Considering everything that had transpired in the blogosphere, the chief was relaxed and amiable. He did, however, shoot me a few barbs and there was some counter-fire from the other side of the room. He broadly hinted that his work for MRI was over, saying, “This was past tense.” He said that he did the work on his personal time, and further stated that he would not reveal his earnings from MRI for the last few years nor make public any information on his billable hours to MRI unless he was ordered to do so by the mayor.

Chief Duggan had just returned from a two-week federal training program run by the Naval Postgraduate Center for Homeland Defense and Security in West Virginia. He told me that being in the program was important for Northampton and for his country, and this would take him out of the city and perhaps, out of the country. Evidently with Mayor Higgins’s approval, he applied for, and was accepted to, a master’s degree program at the Center for Homeland Defense and Security. The program is described here: Its objectives include "strategies, plans and programs to prevent terrorist attacks"

I got the sense from talking to Acting Mayor Narkewicz last week that he knew very little about the postgraduate program which had sent Chief Duggan out of the city, and he was essentially playing "catch-up," just like me, talking to the assistant chief, Duane Nichols, and waiting for Duggan to return. The website states that the graduate program "involves a significant commitment on the part of the participants and the agencies to which they are assigned." The 18-month program requires participants to spend two weeks every quarter in its "Eastern Management Development Center" in Shepherdstown, West Virginia and other sites, and calls for 15 hours a week in web-based course work. An academic quarter is three months, and that means the chief will be out of the area a total of 12 weeks over the next year and a half. To me, that time commitment represents a significant burden on his subordinates, as well as on the city of Northampton, which will continue to pay the second highest salary in the city to a part-time fire chief.

As for me, I kind of doubt that we are going to have any terrorist activity in Northampton in the near future that will require a chief who is so highly trained in homeland security strategy. We're just a little Podunk town, and what we really need is a chief who isn't traveling all over the place and working up a resume so he can eventually jump to a much better paying job in Boston or Baghdad. With my final two questions, I verified what I already knew to be true: The department had not initiated any fire drills at Meadowbrook following the big fire in 2009. Yes, they had done some kind of post-fire meeting, the chief said, but it hadn't worked out. When I mentioned the highly carbonized truss-work under the roofs of Meadowbrook, I got a blank look. Ditto for their plans to hold other meetings in neighborhoods outside the water protection district. He had sent everyone outside that district a letter by registered mail, and warned them to get a sprinkler system. It seemed to him that this letter was enough. My concerns seemed trivial.

Reigning in the Northampton Fire Department

Part One

Full-time pay for a part-time chief?

Our public safety administrators are the two top paid people in the city. Former Mayor Mary Clare Higgins commented in Northampton Media, “Police and fire are the only departments in the city that have to cover 24 hours a day seven days a week... “Everybody’s working hard [and] working extremely long hours.”

Not Chief Brian Duggan. Police Chief Sienkowicz may be at his desk at 8:30 AM, but not Duggan. Our second-highest paid official is a double-dipper: drawing a full time salary of $139,095 while drawing a salary as a project manager and consultant for Municipal Resources Inc. of Meredith, New Hampshire.

At most other city offices I know of, the administrators are always there at 8:30 am, facing whatever needs to be done, answering the phone calls and dealing with the latest. They are civic servants. The Chief of Police will be there. I know every weekday about 8:20 am George Zimmerman, our treasurer, will be coming across the Round House parking lot and heading for his office with a big briefcase of papers he probably spent reading the night before. I know that at 8:30 am our building inspector will be sitting at his secretary’s desk making a note to someone and giving me the evil eye as I stand there at the counter with a question.

But the Fire Chief is never at his desk at 8:30 am. Read the story here

The Truck-Eating Bridge, Take Two

The Bridge in 2009

I remember back at the dawn of time, maybe 1993, driving into Boston for a conference being sponsored by the Massachusetts Municipal Association. Don’t ask me what it was all about. I was on the city council, and Mary Ford had just been elected Mayor. She was really excited at the changes she was going to make. Going under the truck-eating railroad bridge, she pointed up at the battered and twisted ironwork and said, as I remember, “If I become Mayor, there’ll never be another truck stuck under than damn bridge.”

“We’ll put up warning cables like they have on Storrow Drive.”

read the full story here

Airport Stories

Down at the LaFleur airport some time after midnight on the cold night of
February 16, 1983, a young kid was trying to make a phone call on the pay phone. The airport is in the meadows area of Northampton next to Route 91. It’s your standard country airport, a tar strip, a scattering of planes and hangars. In winter, it’s a desolate place. After hours, no one is around. A neighbor who usually walks around nights and keeps an eye on things was out of
town on vacation.

It all started with a wrong number and a payphone that wouldn’t return money. Bob was trying to call a friend, lost his money, got angry, and tore the phone off the wall of the hangar. He was a troubled kid, a shabby quiet loner from a rural background who hid behind a big bushy black beard. Someone who might have been a schizophrenic. Someone who brooded a lot about the state of the world, who had been hospitalized out at the Northampton State Hospital, and now was living at Northampton Lodgings, a brick building on Pleasant Street close to downtown, going to meetings, and taking his medication. Norma Rubeck, who managed the place in the days when the place was managed, told me he was a weird one. The graduates and drop-outs of Northampton’s mental institutions have always given our town a certain odd flavor. Just as many of the five college graduates stick around the area after graduation, so did many people from the Northampton State Hospital and the Veterans Medical Center in Leeds, which had a big in-patient and out-patient mental population.

A counselor who knew him told me that he hated the airport. Guys in his recovery program had talked about it and how the heroin and cocaine that was a big part of street life came through Lafleur on light planes flying in from the Martha's Vineyard or further south. Staring down at the wreckage of the phone, he saw something glinting on the ground. A key, with a tag attached. On the tag was a woman’s name, and a plane registration number. Click here to read the story.