Feb. 06--LITTLE ORLEANS -- Like many small volunteer fire departments, the Orleans Volunteer Fire Company depends on chicken barbecues and other fundraisers to keep running calls for fires, traffic accidents and other emergency calls.
You can often find firefighters along with their family and friends placing signs advertising the regular chicken barbecue along the local roads, including Interstate 68. The main road to the small community intersects with the interstate in eastern Allegany County.
Now those signs, and the funds they raise, may be threatened as State Highway Administration officials enforce right of way rules that ban the signs along the interstate.
"I'd say probably 70 percent of our business comes off the interstate, and without those signs, we'd lose that business," said Orleans Fire Chief John Clingerman. "If it wasn't for our fundraisers, our volunteer company wouldn't last long," Clingerman said.
Fire company officials enlisted the help of Allegany County commissioners and commission president Michael McKay, then contacted state legislators for help Friday.
"I have been approached by the Little Orleans Volunteer Fire Company with a request. They have major concerns with the implementation of ... state law concerning signs along the interstate. ... Please note the following; the signs are put out the day of the event and are removed at night or until they sell out of chicken," McKay wrote to Delegate Kevin Kelly. "I have also been told that this law exempts churches. Can you research the possibility to adding language to exempt volunteer fire companies as well?" McKay asked.
Kelly contacted highways officials.
"I would be most appreciative if the appropriate SHA representative immediately investigate Commissioner McKay's extremely legitimate inquiry and thereafter promptly respond to same," Kelly wrote. He asked SHA to identify the law or regulation that banned the signs "advertising barbecue chicken dinners (which are delicious) and which are the fire company's primary fundraiser," Kelly wrote.
Kelly hopes a compromise might be worked out.
"From prior conversations with SHA personnel I understand SHA 'right-of-ways' vary throughout Allegany County. ... As such, I would be most appreciative if the appropriate SHA personnel would meet with the appropriate Orleans ... representatives to determine 'mutually' satisfactory locations where said signs advertising these ... dinners can be so situated adjacent to Interstate 68," Kelly wrote.
Melinda Peters, the SHA administrator, said she's looking into the situation and promised Kelly a response.
"I will work with our team to get you information by early next week. I will also ask (District Engineer) Tony Crawford to contact the fire company," Peters wrote in response to Kelly on Saturday. The barbecues take place about five times a year, usually on Sundays, said Bob Littleton, the fire company's vice president.
"They (the SHA) said there was nothing they could do, because it came from the governor," Littleton said. SHA officials told him the regulation had been on the books for some time.
Littleton said Monday afternoon he'd heard nothing new from the SHA and was waiting to hear back from county commissioners.
It wouldn't be a pretty picture should the fire company, in a long stretch of lonely highway, have to shut its doors, said Clingerman.
"If they think we have problems on the highway now, see what problems you are going to have with accidents, injuries and spills if we fold up," Clingerman said.
Contact Matthew Bieniek at [email protected].
Copyright 2012 - Cumberland Times-News, Md.
