Gunning, EVFC split on room rental prospects
by Robert Lynch; February 7, 2025
A scab got scraped open this week in Enfield. It had covered a wound that’s hung around for maybe the past 37 years, but has never, ever quite healed. Maybe it never will.
To some, it’s a matter of opportunity lost.
Town taxpayers, albeit indirectly, built the current Enfield Volunteer Fire Company (EVFC) fire station in 1988. To the left of its modern, multi-bay apparatus room stands a spacious meeting hall. It may be larger than necessary. About the only time any outsider sees it filled is at the annual Christmastime banquet. Fair enough. It’s already built. And better it be a bit too large than not large enough.
But the meeting room sees little use outside of EVFC meeting and training events. The Fire Company senses no need—and shows no interest—in renting out the meeting facilities to outsiders. And for the newest member of the Enfield Board of Fire Commissioners, that’s a problem. Donald Gunning is the man who last Tuesday night scratched the scab open.
“We can’t use the space… We can’t rent it out,” Gunning, elected Commissioner last December on a taxpayer-partial platform, said of the fire station’s meeting facilities.
Though he’s a man of few words, Gunning cast the lone dissent February 4th as the Board of Fire Commissioners approved a continuing, one-year lease of the EVFC-owned fire station for use by the Enfield Fire District, the legal entity that the commissioners now oversee. It marked Gunning’s first dissenting vote since he took office two meetings earlier.
Under a Town Board restructuring of the fire service in 2023, the Fire District and its commissioners now serve as the bridge between the building-owning Fire Company and the Enfield taxpayer.
Two nights later, Thursday, February 6th, Fire Company membership approved the lease unanimously.
“While this may not be perfect, we need someplace where to operate out of and where to park our trucks,” Board of Fire Commissioners Chair Greg Stevenson said regarding the lease prior to the Board’s Tuesday night approval.
Commissioners’ approval of the lease was expected to have been routine. A nearly-identical lease was authorized one year ago without controversy. The Fire District paid the Fire Company $72,000 for rental of the station during 2024. This year it’s paying $75,000, an approximate four per cent increase.
The $75,000 estimate had been placed into the district’s budget last fall. Meeting after meeting for the past several months, Commissioners had planned to act on the lease only to be told that attorneys for the two parties had not yet met to nitpick the agreement’s fine points. Nobody had expected problems.
“It is what it is,” Commissioner Barry “Buddy” Rollins, who doubles as Enfield’s Highway Superintendent, said of the new lease the night of the commissioners’ vote. “But $23,000 is a lot for what the mortgage is.”
Rollins was speaking of the difference between what the Fire District will pay this year to rent the building and the annual mortgage payment its owner, the EVFC, must pay the bank. Stevenson reports the mortgage charge this year is just under $52,000.
Rollins, like Gunning, has been a critic of the Fire Company and how the EVFC spends its money.
Famously, Rollins had faulted the EVFC for taking the $76,000 proceeds from sale of an offloaded fire engine in 2023 and putting it into a “firemen’s fund” to cover everyday expenses rather than crediting the money to the cost of a new, much more expensive pumper that the company—and later the Fire District— bought to replace it.
“We have to build up some sort of reserve account,” EVFC President Dennis Hubbell told commissioners, Hubbell directing his comments mostly at Rollins and Gunning. And even though the District now owns most of the trucks, hoses and related apparatus that fight Enfield’s fires, incidental costs crop up, he said. For example, Hubbell fears the building’s boiler may fail.
The company president noted that just that night he’d reported to Commissioners his need to spend more than $6,000 on a new, replacement Internet server to make the fire station’s Wi-Fi work. Hubbell requested that the Fire District shoulder a portion of that cost. It hasn’t decided whether to do so yet.
“We had to borrow money from the firemen’s account to make it through this year,” Hubbell advised Commissioners.
But although Rollins, perhaps grudgingly, joined the majority in authorizing the new building lease, Gunning held out, remaining adamant about the loss of revenue that outside rentals might bring in.
“The fire company chose not to be in the hall rental business,” Stevenson told Gunning and others at the February 4th meeting. What’s more, Stevenson said, renting out the meeting room now would place firefighters in direct competition with the Enfield Community Council, which rents out its “Great Room,” the one-time sanctuary in the former church it bought, to host celebrations like wedding receptions and craft fairs.
And both Hubbell and Stevenson made it clear that building rentals don’t come without cost. The fire station needs to be managed were outside parties to use the building, they said. Volunteers would need to be present. Fire records warrant protection.
Hubbell, a local firefighter since the 1970’s, has a long memory of when the former fire station—now the Enfield Courthouse, Town Board meeting room, and Food Pantry—used to be the EVFC’s headquarters and was then made available to others.
Stuff was “always damaged,” Hubbell said. There was extra use of heat; bathrooms. “Nobody in the Fire Company wants to be a renter,” the president insisted.
Moreover, Hubbell said, there were competitive turf wars. “I used to catch crap from the Grange,” Hubbell remembered. “Now we’ve got two hammering us,” Hubbell said, likely referring to both the Enfield Valley Grange and the Community Council, each renters of space.
“We’re here to fight fires and train and not in the rental business,” Hubbell reiterated.
Why Enfield never demanded its fire service rent out its big, new meeting room for cash—or for that matter, move Town Board meetings over there—brings from those then present a variety of answers. One explanation holds that the Town Board was too frugal to authorize a deeper excavation for parts of the new building to prevent the spread of fire truck chemicals into meeting space. It became a codes compliance issue.
Some say the split centered on insurance coverage. And the simplest argument of all equates to strength of will. The fire company simply doesn’t want to let others into its building.
Town Board minutes at the time (1987-1988) provide little insight as to how the Town and its fire company chose to walk their separate paths.
But the issue of fire hall access nearly came to a head just last month. That’s when it briefly appeared that the Community Council and the Tompkins County Board of Elections would part ways and not renew their long-standing contract for use of the Enfield Community Center as the community’s voting location. The issue was settled and the contract renewed. But before it was, some considered the fire station as an alternate polling spot. Told later, fire officials were surprised that it was.
“We had a hall designed as a community center, and the Town Board shot it down with blazing guns,” Dennis Hubbell recalled as to the late-80’s buried-in-time standoff as he spoke just before Commissioners ratified the current agreement, 4-1.
After the meeting, Chair Stevenson said he’ll strive for a more “comprehensive” building lease the next time around. The chairman held out the possibility of a multi-year agreement and one written with greater precision.
And although attorneys have recommended against it, nothing stops the Enfield Fire District from going out on its own and building its own station, perhaps next to the Town’s current Highway Garage down the road. But the $1 Million-plus investment could prove prohibitive, especially with commissioners like Don Gunning seeking to pinch pennies.
But were such a bold move to occur, it would leave the EVFC with a four-decade old building that lacks a clear purpose. And that would include, of course, its meeting room.
###