Residents, trustees urge DeKalb County board to delay fire-trustee appointment

Several residents and current fire-district trustees urged the DeKalb County Board to delay consideration of a proposed appointment to a community fire protection district board, saying the county did not follow past local practice and that the public and district leaders were not notified.

The speakers said the county’s executive committee was presented an application for a self-nominated candidate alongside a chief’s recommendation for reappointment, and that the committee chose the self-nominated applicant based on the length of the submission rather than the chief’s recommendation. The matter was discussed during public comment and during committee consideration; the board moved to table the appointment until further review.

The dispute centers on how trustee appointments have been handled in recent years. “In my 30 years plus experience here in DeKalb County, Fire Trustees were usually only appointed by the board when the vacancy occurred,” volunteer firefighter and EMS captain Joe Herman said. He said past practice was for the fire chief and remaining trustees to submit a recommended replacement when a vacancy occurred, and that the current situation—where a resident’s letter of interest apparently was considered—came “as much surprise.”

Steve Props, who said he is a current trustee with the Shetland Community Fire District, told the board he recalled that “every appointment to the work was recommended by the chief.” Props said the executive committee was presented a name it had not previously seen: the self-nomination of a resident identified in public remarks as Richard. Props said Richard had not attended district meetings and that the information presented to the executive committee was “misleading.”

Other speakers echoed those concerns and asked the board to table the appointment to allow additional review. “I would ask that the board consider tabling the consideration for appointment of a new trustee until next month’s meeting, to allow for further investigation,” said William Heiminger, who said he had attended recent district meetings and town halls. Trustee Allison Hinprops, who said she has served the Village of Shabnam since 2021, read meeting-attendance and ordinance-enforcement records about a past village trustee and said those records should be considered by the county before making a county appointment.

County legal counsel raised a separate but related governance concern: if two members of a three-person fire district board are active firefighters, the counsel said, the board could be unable to take financial votes because those members would be disqualified from voting on certain matters. Counsel recommended returning the matter to the executive committee for further review. After discussion, a motion to table consideration was made and seconded; the item will be revisited at next month’s meeting, and the recommendation will remain on the appointment list pending additional submissions or review.

Speakers pressed several procedural points: that the county notify districts and solicit input from fire chiefs before making an appointment, that the executive committee make candidate materials available to committee members before voting, and that the board clarify whether self-nominations are permitted and how they will be weighed against chief recommendations. “I think it’d be a good idea to have more than one set of eyes on some of this stuff,” a board member said during committee discussion.

No final appointment was made at the meeting. The board’s action was to table the appointment and to allow the executive committee time to gather additional information and, if necessary, solicit further candidate recommendations from districts and chiefs.

Clarifying details provided in public remarks included that two applications had been submitted for the vacancy, that one application was longer and more detailed than the other, and that the chief had recommended reappointment of Hank Fraser. Speakers also said that some candidates had limited attendance records at village or district meetings and that an existing village ordinance (cited during public comment as an ordinance related to fines for nonattendance) had been applied to a former village trustee’s record.

The public comments on this item were concentrated in the meeting’s public-comment period and in subsequent committee discussion. Board members and counsel agreed to return the matter to the executive committee for additional review and to allow further submissions before making a final appointment.