ORRINGTON, Maine — Town Manager Paul White said Tuesday the town has no plan yet for replacing its fire chief, whose dismissal was upheld by the Board of Selectmen after a more than 3½-hour appeal hearing the night before.
About 100 residents, including several of the town’s firefighters, were on hand Monday night to witness as selectmen voted 5-0 to uphold the town manager’s decision last month to dismiss Fire Chief Mike Spencer.
“At this point, there is no definite plan for exactly how that’s going to be structured,” White said when asked about naming a replacement for Spencer. “I’ll be meeting with my staff and safety people over the next week or so. We’ll plan a strategy and bring it forward to the Board of Selectmen.”
Selectmen likely will take the matter up at their next regular meeting, set for May 23, he said.
In the interim, Assistant Fire Chief Scott Stewart is handling Spencer’s former duties on a part-time basis, White said. Stewart works about 30 hours a week.
The decision to affirm Spencer’s firing came after several years of clashes between Spencer and Town Manager Paul White, including previous disciplinary action in 2013.
The most recent conflicts — those that led White to suspend and then fire Spencer — involved Spencer’s unauthorized visit to the Newport fire station, disparaging remarks about White that the town manager was told Spencer made during that visit, an alleged breach of confidentiality about the town’s plan to build a new public safety building and his failure to return his town-issued cellphone in a timely manner after his suspension.
Spencer and his attorney, A.J. Greif of Bangor, maintain that Spencer was fired in retaliation for concerns he expressed to the town manager about adequate ambulance personnel coverage as well as the trip to the Newport fire building in his role as a member of the Orrington Public Safety Building Committee, which White also belongs to.
To that end, Spencer filed a complaint with the Maine Human Rights Commission on April 27 claiming he was discriminated against based on “whistleblower retaliation.”
Most of those who attended the hearing were there to support Spencer and to question what led to his firing.
Resident Todd Bishop had questions about the town’s disciplinary process for employees.
“If there’s no process, they don’t have to follow anything. They’re not legally bound to follow anything if they don’t have anything in place,” he said.
“That’s what’s so upsetting to all of these residents, is that there’s a lot of us who think this is a personality conflict that ended in a dismissal and one should not be dismissed because you don’t get along, especially if that man has served the community and his [performance reviews were positive]. He’s obviously competent based on what everybody has said,” Bishop said.
Selectmen said Monday night that the decision was not an easy one to make because they were not displeased with Spencer’s efforts in leading the Fire Department.
“I don’t think there’s anybody here that doesn’t think Mr. Spencer is a good person,” Chairman Kevin Allcroft said after the vote. “Also, he’s probably a very good fireman. I’ve known him since I came to town. … But in the end, Mr. Spencer was an employee of Paul White,” and as such, should have complied with White’s wishes.
“ … It’s a personnel issue. It should have been done in private not in public, not in the newspaper, not out in public, unfortunately. But that is why I choose to uphold the vote for Paul White as a firing of an employee who was not doing his job consistently,” Allcroft said.
Spencer declined to comment after the decision, referring questions to Greif.
“I expected this board to rubber stamp what Paul White had done. My mama didn’t raise a fool,” Greif said.
“I think that the Maine Human Rights Commission whistleblower complaint is where we were going to report that Paul White was adamant that they not spend $140 a week to make sure that the folks in Orrington got an ambulance five or 10 minutes sooner than is currently the case. That was a huge bone of contention between these two just a month before this man was fired.”
Greif and Spencer said that White would not allow him to pay $10 stipends to each of the two ambulance personnel that Spencer wanted to have on standby overnight seven days a week as a way of ensuring quicker response times.
Spencer was suspended with pay on April 14 and fired on April 20, according to a previously published report. His salary was approximately $50,000 a year.
A group of residents upset about Spencer’s firing filled the selectmen’s meeting room two weeks ago hoping to talk to the board about the action but were shut down before discussion began, according to a previously published report. At that meeting, town attorney Ed Bearor said selectmen could not take comments on the termination because Spencer had not yet filed an appeal.
Spencer also was disciplined by town officials three years ago.
In the spring of 2013, he was suspended without pay for two weeks because he allowed off-duty firefighters and others to hang out at the fire station, did not record 12 hours of sick time and drove a town vehicle to his other job.
Spencer said at the time that he informed those who gathered regularly at the fire station that they could no longer do so, that he forgot to write down the sick time and that he used the designated chief’s vehicle to go to his job at R.H. Foster so that he could get back to town if there was an incident.
Those matters became public during an open grievance hearing conducted at Spencer’s request.
Spencer was elected fire chief by the department’s firefighters in 2004. The next year, he combined the town’s volunteer fire and rescue departments into one municipal department and was appointed chief.
BDN writers Judy Harrison and Nok-Noi Ricker contributed to this report.