By Ashley M. Casey
Staff Writer
Relations between the village of North Syracuse and the North Syracuse Volunteer Fireman’s Association remain strained over a proposed audit of the NSVFA, but Mayor Gary Butterfield said he is pursuing the audit to protect both the association and the village.
“We’re in this together. It doesn’t make sense to be at cross-purposes,” Butterfield told the Star-Review.
At the Aug. 11 meeting of the board of trustees, village officials expressed concern that the Fireman’s Association was excluding the village from decisions regarding a partial audit. In an Aug. 24 letter to the editor, NSVFA President Jozsef Asztalos said the village is shutting out the association.
“None of the four trustees, the mayor or the village attorney have made any effort to contact the executive board of the NSVFA or our attorney,” Asztalos wrote. “This lack of communication between the village leadership and the volunteer firefighters of the fire department is nothing new; in fact, we expressed this concern to the mayor in July.”
Butterfield said he has attended association meetings and corresponded with Asztalos via email and telephone, but recently, no one from either the NSVFA or the North Syracuse Fire Department has attended village board meetings. He said fire department officials have been absent from the last six meetings.
“They don’t come to the village anymore,” Butterfield said. “Yet we’re the ones they rely on for funding.”
In an email to the Star-Review, Asztalos reiterated that the NSVFA is an independent 501(c)(3) organization that is separate from both the fire department and the village.
“As such, our leadership does not have a need to regularly attend the village board meetings. However, had the mayor requested our presence I would [have] assured that myself or a designee attended,” Asztalos wrote. “I am not authorized to speak on behalf of the fire department leadership (the chiefs) as to why they were or were not in attendance.”
Butterfield said that in his decade on the village board, the board “never had communication with the Fireman’s Association on a formal level.” He said the two entities communicated through the fire chiefs and, until recently, he was unaware of the makeup of the Fireman’s Association and how it operated.
The Star-Review found information about the membership of the NSVFA and a P.O. Box address on the North Syracuse Fire Department’s website, northsyracusefire.com, but there was no phone number or email address for NSVFA officials. A Google search of the organization did not reveal current contact information either. Asztalos provided his email address to the Star-Review when he wrote his letter to the editor.
Taxpayers in the towns of Cicero and Clay fund the NSFD. The fire department presents its budget to the village of North Syracuse; the village relays that information to the towns and then allocates the funding to the fire department.
“[The towns] are asking more questions of us and our budget process,” Butterfield said. “I didn’t want to say, ‘I don’t know.’”
Asztalos said the towns have not asked similar questions of the association itself.
“To my knowledge, neither the town of Clay [nor] the town of Cicero have expressed concerns with our accounting practices. I have personally met the supervisor for the town of Cicero when he extended an invitation to me for an unrelated meeting earlier this year that I was happy to attend and represent the NSVFA at,” he wrote.
Butterfield said he knows the NSVFA has provided the fire department with funding and support, and the village has never tried to withhold the association’s share of funding.
“By state law, they are entitled to that money for their association. We have never not paid it,” Butterfield said. “They don’t seem to understand that we’re responsible to the taxpayers. … The reluctance to share information is troubling.”
Despite their inability to see eye-to-eye on the impending audit, both the village and the Fireman’s Association agree that there has been a communication breakdown.
“The communication between the NSVFA and the village of North Syracuse needs to be improved. We have expressed this concern with the mayor on several occasions,” Asztalos said. “I will not speculate as to why that condition exists as I do not feel that such comments are productive. I am committed to a good faith effort in order to address the village’s request for an audit while maintaining our autonomy as an independent organization.”
