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riental’s Town Board voted at its November 6 meeting that the fire siren should stay where it has been for more than a half century — on a pole behind the Town Hall.

Town Manager Bob Maxbauer (foreground, at right) speaks at Tuesday’s Town Board meeting. Across the room, 9 members of the volunteer fire department were lined up, and warily listened. They said they’d twice been promised by the Town Manager that the siren would stay at Town Hall, only to later hear that the Town would not keep that commitment. At this meeting Maxbauer suggested they look at the White Farm Road water tower as a site for the siren.

That appeared to settle the matter in favor of the local fire department – which wanted it to stay there – but not before the fire chief said he felt Town officials had “blindsided” his department with an “end run” more than once, to put the siren somewhere other than Town Hall.

Questions Over Promises Bring Out Residents, Fire Fighters

Despite happening on Election Night, the Town Board’s November 6 meeting drew about 35 residents, more than double the usual attendance. Most were there to show support for the Southeast Pamlico Volunteer Fire Department, and 9 of the volunteer firefighters attended as well.

The news that the Town might be backing away from the agreement the Town Manager made to keep the siren at Town Hall drew a larger than usual crowd. Here, resident Barbara Stockton urged the Board to stick to the deal worked out and follow the fire department’s guidance on where the siren should go.

That show of solidarity developed after the Southeast Pamlico Volunteer Fire Department got wind that the Town’s officials might be backing away from a promise made just a week earlier to keep the siren at Town Hall. The Fire Department says that would be the second incident in recent weeks in which an agreement it thought it had with the Town Manager Bob Maxbauer was broken.

Mayor Says Sites Other Than Town Hall Should Be Considered

At the meeting, the firemen lined up along one side of the room, and listened along with residents, as Mayor Bill Sage began to lay out his case for considering other locations for the siren besides Town Hall.

Mayor Bill Sage speaking in favor of looking at more than just Town Hall as a site for the fire siren. At left is Warren Johnson, one of three commissioners present and later, part of the 3-0 vote to keep the siren at Town Hall.

Mayor Sage started by talking about the Town Board’s special meeting eight days earlier, on Monday night October 29. At that meeting, with 50 residents and firefighters attending, the Town Board directed the fire department and Town Manager to look in to solutions and aim to keep the siren at Town Hall if it weren’t prohibitively expensive.

The Mayor’s account of that meeting differed. He said that his recollection of that meeting was that the siren would go to one of three locations. Town Hall was one of the possibilities, in his view, not the only one.

At the November 6 meeting, Fire Chief Alan Arnfast and fireman Danny Forman took issue with some of the representations made about the fire siren location. Arnfast contested the Mayor’s account of a meeting the Mayor didn’t attend. Forman objected when it seemed that a commissioner was reducing the dispute to ‘miscommunication’.

The mayor then spoke of the Tuesday, October 30 meeting attended by four fire department members, Town Manager Bob Maxbauer and two commissioners, Larry Summers and Barbara Venturi. The firemen and commissioners said after that meeting that the Town Manager agreed to keep the siren at Town Hall and even had promised a precise site for it. But as Mayor Sage laid out his description of that meeting he had not attended, he did not mention that agreement.

Instead, Sage said that the upshot of the October 30 meeting was that an inexpensive way had been found to convert 1-phase power to 3-phase electrical power. Previously, the Town Manager had claimed (on October 29th) that it would cost upwards of $7,000 to keep the siren at town hall; the price plummeted to about $1000-$1500 on October 30 when the 1-phase to 3-phase conversion solution emerged.

Town Manager Bob Maxbauer at the November 6 Town Board meeting where he suggested the Fire Department look at putting the fire siren atop the town’s newest water tower on White Farm Road. He did not address concerns stated by the Fire Chief that an ‘end run ‘ was being played around an agreement to keep the siren at Town Hall. (At right in photo is newly hired Town Hall renovation Project Assistant Laura Penninger.)

In the Mayor’s view, solving that electrical issue economically meant that several locations other than Town Hall could be home to the siren. Among the possible locations now on the Mayor’s list: the fire station, a mile and a half from the center of town, on Straight Road.

As the mayor put it, “The constriction of our consideration to locations that had 3 phase power was removed.”

Fire Chief To Mayor: “You’ve Been Misled”

At this point in the Mayor’s narrative, Fire Chief Alan Arnfast interrupted.

“That’s where you deviate,” Arnfast told the Mayor. “I have to interrupt because that (other siren locations) was never spoken of at that Tuesday meeting.”

Fire Chief Alan Arnfast, listening as the fire siren debate carried on. He said he’d thought the debate had been settled a week earlier. Arnfast told the Town Board that the fire department felt it had been “blindsided” by another “end run” around agreements with the Town Manager to keep the siren at Town Hall.

“We were told by Mr. Maxbauer exactly where the pole was going, exactly how he was going to run the conduit,” Arnfast said of the meeting that ended up behind Town Hall. “Never in that meeting, which I attended every minute of, was it ever discussed that that opened up the options to other locations.”

Arnfast told the Mayor, “You’ve either been misled or you have an agenda that takes us to other locations.”

“I do not have an agenda,” said the Mayor.

“Then you’ve been misled,” Arnfast replied.

Arnfast said that the fire department, which serves Oriental and the district around it, has had internal debates over the years about the siren location. But, Arnfast added, the firemen both in the past — and now — have always voted unanimously not to move the siren from Town Hall. One consideration, Arnfast said, is that whatever neighborhood it moved to, it would encounter resistance.

From left, Town Commissioner Warren Johnson, Mayor Bill Sage, Commissioners Larry Summers and Barbara Venturi. Fellow Town Board members Michelle Bessette and Sherrill Styron were not present.

In the face of Arnfast’s comments, the Mayor backed down from trying to locate the siren at a location other than Town Hall. “If you as a fire department responsible for alerting the public (with the siren) are satisfied that there are serious drawbacks to putting it at the fire station, that’s great,” Sage said. “If that means it ought to go at Town Hall, that’s fine. I just want to be able for the public to understand. There are those who have concerns about it being put back at Town Hall. I want everybody here and there to be able to defend the decision.”

(One resident at the October 29 meeting had said he wanted the siren moved because it hurt his business, an inn across the street from Town Hall. The Mayor who lives a block from Town Hall said at that meeting that he sleeps through the siren, but he noted at that time that his wife does not. )

Blindsided Again?

In his comments to the Town Board, Alan Arnfast expressed frustration with the way things had unfolded in recent months as his fire department dealt with the Town Manager over the siren.

“We all shook hands in good faith, we ended the meeting in total harmony,” he said of his Tuesday October 30 meeting with the Town Manager.

Town Commissioner Barbara Venturi at the November 6 meeting. She said that after attending an October 30 meeting between the fire department and Town Manager Bob Maxbauer, she understood that the fire siren was to stay at Town Hall. Mayor Bill Sage presented a different interpretation of the meeting, though he had not attended it.

That was the second time the Fire Department thought it had a deal, only to watch as an attempt was made to unravel it after the handshakes. In August, the firemen thought they also had an agreement with the Town Manager.

“Every time we turn our back and think we have an agreement,” Arnfast said, “we get blindsided again by another end run.”

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Town Board Weighs In

While the Mayor suggested that the Town Board could vote “on whether there is any objection by the Town to having it put at Town Hall,”
Commissioner Larry Summers was more direct in laying out his motion.

Commissioner Larry Summers speaks after Mayor Bill Sage tried to make the case for testing the siren at locations other than Town Hall. Summers said the Town Manager, Bob Maxbauer first raised the issue of moving the siren from Town Hall at a Town Board meeting months ago. HE thought it was a dead issue then. To make certain that it was this time, Summers offered a motion to keep the siren at Town Hall.

Summers moved that the Town Board “approve the Southeast Pamlico Volunteer Fire Department’s request to return the refurbished siren to the Oriental Town Hall location. This is to be accomplished in coordination with the Oriental Town Manager and the fire department is to pay the expenses of such action.”

By then, a few members of the public had spoken, all in favor of the siren staying at Town Hall. Many opted not to speak when it became apparent that the three commissioners present — Summers, Venturi and Warren Johnson — were ready to vote to do that.

For his part, Johnson said he wanted the siren to be where the fire department wanted it. Though the fire department has nicknamed the siren “Aggie” out of Greek mythology, Johnson referred to it at “that rascal.” Noting one of the firefighters attending the meeting, Johnson said, “I want Bob Dales to be able to hear that rascal because he might have to come and save my life.”

He added, “I think that rascal is going to be cute over at the Town Hall.” The comment drew laughter and applause. (The Town Manager had initially said he didn’t want the siren put back at Town Hall after its renovations because it would mar the “aesthetic.”)

Town Commissioner Warren Johnson voted to keep the siren at Town Hall where he said he thought it would “be cute”.

One Way Miscommunication

In his comments to fellow Board members and the public, Larry Summers started out by saying, “I truly believe 90% of this problem is miscommunication..”

That prompted fireman Danny Forman to counter, “No, sir.” That caused Summers to pause before continuing and suggesting that the miscommunication was, “not necessarily on your side,” he said. Rather he said, it was “on our side.”

“Now,” Forman said, “we agree.”

Summers related that at a Town Board meeting months earlier the Town Manager raised the issue of the siren moving from Town Hall to the water tower,. Summers says he recollected that at that time, “the sense of every single commissioner was to leave it at Town Hall.” Summers noted, however, “we didn’t take a vote on it” which might have settled the matter back then.

Nonetheless, Summers told the audience at the November 6 meeting that he thought the concept of moving the fire siren to another location “was a dead deal.. until my mother-in-law brought it back to me a week and a half ago.” Summer’s mother-in-law, Barb Barden, told him she’d been told the siren might be moving to her neighborhood — either on the town-owned Gilgo Road lot next to the Oriental Woman’s Club, or the Town’s water tower, at the end of Gilgo Road, next to her home.

Jim and Barb Barden. Jim Barden spoke against putting the siren anywhere other than Town Hall, echoing others who said that it wasn’t fair to foist it on a new neighborhood. Barden, who with his wife Barb, lives next to the town’s first water tower, noted that his neighborhood already dealt with the smell of the sulphur treatment there. While that was a known quantity when he moved in, the siren was not.

Neill Haggard asked the board to do as the Fire Department wanted and keep the siren at Town Hall. The Town Manager’s efforts to site it elsewhere could have put the siren in Haggard’s residential neighborhood, a presence he had not expected when purchasing his home a few years ago.

Many others who live in that residential neighborhood also strongly opposed the Town Manager’s efforts to move the siren from Town Hall and in to their midst.

Town Manager Suggests New Water Tower For Siren

Maxbauer had initially cited aesthetics at Town Hall as a reason to move the siren. Later, he cited the cost of putting back 3-phase wiring at the Town Hall building he is renovating.

Before the Town Board took its vote on the matter at its November 6 meeting, Town Manager Maxbauer asked to speak. In his five minutes of speaking, the Town Manager did not address the fire department’s visible displeasure at twice having an agreement it had with him seem to come undone.

Maxbauer did make a pitch for putting the siren on the Town’s second water tower off of White Farm Road. He spoke of a “possible consideration” for the Fire Department to place the siren at the Town’s second water tower “at any time now or in the future.” Maxbauer said he had found a map showing the decibel level that could be heard in a wider area from that site. He said he wanted “everyone to look at that data at some time and take that in to consideration.”

A Vote Makes It Official

That parting shot from the Town Manager had some of the firemen shaking their heads after the meeting, and some expressed concern that the debate could reopen in the future. Still, the Fire Department did get what they wanted from the November 6th meeting: the Town Board voted 3-0 to keep the siren at Town Hall (two of the Town Board’s other members were absent.)

Oriental’s Town Board at right listens to Town Manager Bob Maxbauer (foreground). Ultimately, it came down to Oriental’s Town Commissioners to decide the matter. Two commissioners were absent but the three present – Barb Venturi, Larry Summers and Warren Johnson – were unanimous in keeping the siren at Town Hall. Mayor Sage did not vote; he votes only when there is a tie.

As the motion noted, the fire department will be paying the costs of reinstalling the siren at its long time location. Alan Arnfast estimates it’ll cost his department about $2500. That would cover the converter/generator to switch Town Hall’s 1-phase power to 3-phase and the 60-foot treated-wood piling — 10 feet of which will be sunk in the ground. At 50 feet above ground level, the siren will be 15 feet higher than it was before the Town Hall renovation. That could mean that the siren’s sound waves are flung farther out and reverberate less than they do now for the homes close to it.

The Town Board vote did not set a deadline for re-erecting the siren, which had been taken down while the building underwent renovations.

The Town Manager has said the exterior renovations at Town Hall are supposed to be completed by the time of the Spirit of Christmas celebration, the second weekend in December. It is not clear if the siren will be up on the pole behind Town Hall by the time the Christmas parade – with the Southeast Pamlico Volunteer Fire Department bringing up the rear — passes by.

Other stories about the fire siren at Town Hall:

Fire Siren To Stay At Town Hall Published November 1, 2002

Fire Siren At Town Hall Not A Done Deal Says Mayor Published November 5, 2012

The issue has generated a number of Letters To The Editor, which you may read by clicking here.

Posted Wednesday November 14, 2012 by Melinda Penkava