The Skenesborough Volunteer Fire Company failed to provide the village board with documents detailing its operations despite a request from village officials to do so.

The village requested that both the Skenesborough Volunteer Fire Company and the Whitehall Volunteer Fire Company provide numerous documents by Tuesday’s village board meeting and while Whitehall complied, Skenesborough did not.

Afterward, Mayor Peter Telisky said the village will formulate a response and proceed from there. He didn’t go into detail what that response would entail, but did express the board’s dissatisfaction with the fire company’s inaction.

The village had requested the documents in an effort to monitor the fire companies and ensure that they weren’t saddled with any liability issues or debts.

The request came less the two months after the Skenesborough Volunteer Fire Company voted against dissolutions.

The company decided to explore the option of dissolution earlier this spring, citing declining membership and financial concerns.

Because the company has expressed a desire to continue operating, the village had asked each of the fire companies to detail how they would continue operating in the future.

There are some concerns that if either fire company were to suffer financial ruin, or an untrained firefighter was injured and caused injury to another, that the village could be held responsible.

Among the information requested were rosters of active members, training records, fiscal reports, and short and long term goals that detail how the companies plan to operate and what they hope to achieve.

Whitehall submitted a very detailed report, contained hundreds of pages of information and company president Brian Brooks said they have taken steps to publish some of that information — such as company goals-on their website.

No one from the Skenesborough Volunteer Fire Company attended Tuesday’s meeting and no reason was provided as to why they failed to provide the documents.

It was unclear Tuesday evening if the village would extend the deadline for the information.

 

In other matters, Department of Public Works Superintendent Don Williams expressed to the board his desire to purchase a 2001 New York State Thruway plow truck.

Williams said the truck would cost $14,000 and would be purchased with funds accrued through the sale of scrap pipe and wouldn’t any tax burden on village residents.

Mayor Telisky said the village’s fleet of plow trucks has become somewhat depleted over the last few years. The village has only three trucks for plowing it’s roadways and one of them has a broken frame and needs a new clutch, with an estimated cost of $8,000.

Williams said without a new truck, the village could be in a tough situation if any other vehicles were to go down, even for a short period of time, during a snowstorm.

He estimates the village could get eight years of use out of the truck.

Mayor Telisky also told the board that Standard Northeast had been contacted and made aware that officials were not satisfied with some of the paving done after the installation of a new water main earlier this year.

He described the job as “grainy” and said the company was notified they would be held responsible if the pavement began to break up in the spring.

The company was obligated to return the paved surface to its original condition before the work began.