Daily apologizes for threat

Posted: March 2, 2010

Village of Lannon — A controversial proposal to reorganize the lines of authority between the Village Board and the Fire Department erupted into a shouting match - and a death threat - at a meeting last Tuesday in Village Hall.

Village Trustee Diane Daily later apologized for telling fellow board member Terry Gissal, "You're the first one I'm going to kill."

Gissal has said he would not press charges against Daily.

"I should never have lost my temper," Daily said in an interview Monday, "but that's not the real issue here."

Daily's proposal would change the way fire chiefs are hired. The department's on-call volunteers now elect or re-elect their part-time chief every year. Daily wants the Village Board and its Personnel and Public Safety Committees to make that decision.

One of the problems with the current process is that the majority of the department's volunteers are not Lannon residents, she said.

Fire Chief Gary Georgenson confirmed Monday that 24 of the department's 38 volunteers are nonresidents, but he didn't think that was a problem.

Only the fire chief has to live in Lannon according to current policies, but even that's too restrictive, he said.

"We have volunteers from Butler, Brookfield, Germantown, Lisbon and Menomonee Falls, many of whom would be qualified to serve as chief," he said.

Georgenson, who plans to retire from the $4,800-a-year part-time position when his current one-year term is up, said he would prefer that the village keep its current system.

"If you look at the municipalities around us that don't have a full-time chief," he said, "all of them except Sussex are elected by their volunteers."

The part-time Lannon Fire Chief is paid $4,800 a year; paid on-call volunteer firefighters are paid $9.94 an hour and EMTs $11.92 an hour.

Daily said she had "nothing against the chief. This is about how the next chief will be hired."

Georgenson said a Village Board takeover of the chief's hiring would "politicize" the process.

Village President Dan Martin - like Gissal, a former volunteer firefighter - would also prefer to keep the current system.

"It's been done this way ever since the Fire Department was formed," he said in an interview Monday, "and it seems to work."

Georgenson said politics had already prevented the hiring of a full-time firefighter/emergency medical technician (EMT), even though the Village Board had included the $44,000-a-year position in its budget four years ago.

Martin agreed, saying four board members had objected to the person the chief had selected to fill the position.

"Last year I told the volunteer I had picked that I had hired him," Georgenson said. "Then bad rumors about him started to fly around. I don't know if he'd even take the job now."

Georgenson claimed Daily's proposed new employee manual would worsen the problem, taking hiring, firing and promotions out of the hands of the chief, too.

Daily said the police and fire departments need employee manuals because current policies are "way out of date."

She said, "We looked at manuals in the municipalities all around us and picked language we thought applied to us."

The new manuals would "repeal and replace" current ordinances - a common parliamentary process - that might have led some to believe she was trying to disband the Fire Department, Daily said.

That charge, she said, led to some of the intensity at the meeting, which attracted many volunteer firefighters who challenged her proposals.

Daily also claimed that Amy Martin, a Lannon firefighter/EMT and another candidate in the Village Board election set for April 6, had "spread a rumor" that Daily was trying to disband the Fire Department.

Six candidates are running for three seats in that election.

The charge "doesn't make any sense," Daily said.

"I've always voted for what the people of Lannon want, not what I want. …

"The only way to decide this is by referendum: Would they prefer nonresidents choose the chief or do we want the Village Board and its committees to do the hiring?"