By Cody Lowe
The Roanoke Times
ROANOKE, Va. — After years of troubles with leadership, finances and volunteers, Roanoke County’s volunteer Clearbrook Rescue Squad is facing a forced extinction.
Tuesday night, the county’s board of supervisors unanimously directed County Attorney Paul Mahoney to “commence appropriate legal action against Clearbrook Rescue Squad Inc. to secure an accounting of its financing, distribution of its assets, and dissolution of the organization.”
The action affects only the volunteer rescue squad and will not affect service from the station, Mahoney and County Administrator Clay Goodman said after the meeting. The community will continue to be covered full time by the career firefighter and emergency medical staff there.
No volunteers have been running calls at the station for some time, Mahoney said, which was one of the reasons for seeking to dissolve the organization, which is separate from the community’s volunteer fire department. That separate firefighters volunteer group has been cooperating with the county to dissolve its own organization and dispose of its assets, he said.
Mahoney said he spent the past two months trying to find and negotiate with the individuals listed as officers or directors of the rescue squad, but without success.
Besides not responding to calls, Mahoney said the incorporated nonprofit organization has failed for several years to file required documentation and fees with the State Corporation Commission.
“They were not functioning as a valid and proper corporation,” he said.
“A third piece is the funding. Citizens in Clearbrook have made donations to the rescue squad, and the board of supervisors has made appropriations to all volunteer squads and companies ... but they [Clearbrook’s volunteers] are not running calls. The information we have is that they have still been soliciting donations from citizens.”
When the organization is dissolved, because it is a nonprofit, its assets must go to an organization formed for similar purposes or that fulfills the same goals, Mahoney said.
A final issue is that the organization has not been able to secure a doctor to serve as its medical director, which is required of volunteer squads, he said.
Mahoney said this is the first time the county has ever felt the need to force the dissolution of a squad, even as national trends have evidenced the increasing difficulty of recruiting and retaining public safety volunteers. He said he isn’t sure how long the dissolution will take.
“This is a step the board takes very reluctantly. We value highly the role of volunteers in our community, and we wanted a less adversarial resolution,” Mahoney said.
Volunteers, Goodman said, “are a viable and necessary part of our service, and we want to support those volunteers as long as we can.” The situation in Clearbrook, however, had become untenable, he said.
The Clearbrook squad has been beset with bad news in recent years. At least twice since 2003, officers have been convicted of embezzling funds from the squad. In 2004, the squad was disbanded for a few months, then re-formed.
And, unrelated to the volunteers’ woes, this summer, after seven years of mutual staffing at the station, Roanoke pulled its six career firefighters from Clearbrook saying they were needed elsewhere in the city.
They were replaced with county employees.
Copyright 2009 The Roanoke Times