Dalton Talking Fire Chief, Ambulance Service Monday Night
DALTON, Mass. — The Board of Water Commissioners is meeting in executive session at 4 p.m. on Monday to discuss an employee matter not dealing with professional competence.
Fire Chief James Peltier was placed on administrative leave earlier this month; he did not respond to a request for comment over the weekend but had confirmed to The Berkshire Eagle that Monday's meeting was about him. Board Chair James Driscoll confirmed the chief had been placed on leave but said he could not comment further.
Peltier has been chief since 2021.
The Fire District, overseen by the Board of Water Commissioners, is a separate governmental body from the town. It operates the Water Department, Fire Department and the ambulance service.
Select Board Chair Joe Diver said it was unclear how it would affect the town. It could be human resource-related complaint, he said, or a situation involving finances or insubordination. He indicated it could be time for town to consider merging the fire department and ambulance service under town management.
Diver has not had a formal conversation with the board about this but it but a discussion on the ambulance service is on the agenda for the Select Board's Monday meeting at the Senior Center.
When it comes to investment in those services, Dalton residents are looking at the totality of the proposed budgets across all services in the town, not two distinct town meetings or two separate bodies, Diver said.
This merger was also proposed at the Dalton Fire District meeting by voter Lawrence Gingras who said having separate government bodies is an outdated system developed when residents owned mills.
Currently half of the town's emergency services comes from the town of Dalton and half from the Fire District, he said at the time, and there are two separate annual meetings for taxation that some Dalton residents may not know about.
Diver said there has not been a lot of communication between the Select Board and Water and Fire District.
As an example, he noted the Fire Department's interest in buying a building to expand that's projected to cost $1.2 million.
This project was never discussed with town management or the Select Board, he said.
"And that's why I began looking at how often there is a lack of communication. I think that is the ownership of both the Water Commission and the Select Board not one or the other, but both need to communicate differently, meaning to keep each other up to speed on the decisions that are impacting the town of Dalton," Diver said.
The relationship between the fire and police chief has been good in terms of public safety, he continued. "I don't think there's an issue in that communication, I think it is much more on the board side, that we need to collaborate differently so we're all on the same page when it comes to the investments that need to be made."
