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Troy Newton plans to resign because of skirmishes with city leaders over financial records.
By BRADY DENNIS
© St. Petersburg Times, published February 20, 2001
SAN ANTONIO -- Embattled San Antonio Volunteer Fire Chief Troy Newton announced his intention to resign Monday, and some of the department's volunteers are threatening to leave in his wake.
Newton said he was tired of constant skirmishes with city leaders over the department's financial records.
He swung hardest at Mayor Roy Pierce, his harshest critic.
"I'm into fighting fires, not mayors," Newton said. "With Mayor Pierce, everything is negative. He is trying to dictate how I run the department, questioning every choice I make. It's a personality conflict and I put that aside. He hasn't done that."
Pierce swung back.
"It's a bad thing when you put someone in position to build up an organization and in fact he tears it down," Pierce said, insisting the conflict wasn't personal.
"I don't have any hostility toward him. I don't even know him personally. . . . Truthfulness and doing your job are important to me. He has failed at those things repeatedly."
At the heart of the clash is the fire department's financial records, which Newton had long refused to turn over to the city. He finally turned them over Jan. 4 after city commissioners threatened to cut off funding.
On Jan. 10, a summit of municipal leaders formed a special interim board charged with getting the department back on its feet.
The board still is sorting through paperwork and hasn't offered any conclusions or recommendations yet. But at a Feb. 6 meeting, city commissioner Dennis Phillips said board members were shocked by the shoddy record keeping. He said it was a "paperwork mess" and that turning the department around would be "a big struggle."
Most recently, the board questioned Newton's purchase of a Jeep Cherokee to replace the department's old car, as well as the purchase of some new firefighting equipment.
Newton has said all along that keeping records wasn't his job, but he has insisted he kept a tight eye on the budget.
"What irks me the most is they say I do a terrible job with bookkeeping. That's absolutely right," he said, "I was appointed fire chief. My job is to make sure these guys are properly trained, answer fire calls and fight fires. And I've done that. They should be thanking me. Instead, I'm the bad guy because I didn't keep really good records."
Pierce said Newton hasn't fulfilled many of his responsibilities set out in the department's by-laws and even turned down the city when it offered to help.
"His story on bookkeeping is totally fictitious," Pierce said. "He'd been offered over a two-year period for someone to come in and do it for him.
"And anyway, adding numbers -- whether it's money or men or the number of calls you went on -- is math. It's fourth-grade stuff. He knows all the statistics about the calls he's responded to, but he can't write in a checkbook ledger what $15,000 was for? There's a problem there."
Newton said he will resign formally at a meeting Wednesday. He said he was reluctant to quit, but finally tired of the stress from daily criticism.
"I have a lot of years and a lot of memories here. I've been here since I was 17 years old," said Newton, now 28. "But I'm not willing to devote my time and life to this department, only to be challenged continuously."
He also said many of his volunteers were threatening to leave if he resigned, even though he begged them not to.
"When you lose a good leader, a lot of people follow," Newton said. "I find it hard to believe that 75 miles worth of homes are going to suffer because the mayor doesn't like the fire chief. The community has lost as a result of a single person's ignorance."
"They are running him off, and we at the fire department don't want anybody else," said volunteer firefighter Jewel Lay. "I kind of want to stay and see what happens, but I know I'll probably be the only one there.
"The mayor is supposed to be backing us. The community loves us to death; it's just the guy in charge doesn't. Troy has done so much for the department. It's just not right."
Pierce disagrees. He said he believes volunteers who have left in the past would return if Newton left. And he said he wouldn't be sad to see it happen.
"I was the first to hold his feet to the fire in saying you have to do what the job says you're supposed to do," Pierce said. "You have to do that because the city is obligated to the taxpayers to guarantee the money given for firefighting is spent on firefighting.
"If he was in fact doing or not doing half the things the board has found, thank God he's gone."