Norwich, CT, Threatens to Close Three More Fire Departments for Balking Unified Command
Norwich — Three months after the city shut down Yantic volunteer fire department for failure to comply with a new citywide fire policy, the city now says three other departments have less than a week to comply with the policy or face the same consequences.
The city, in an announcement Tuesday, said it has provided legal notices to the Laurel Hill, Occum and Taftville volunteer departments that require each organization to comply with the city's Unified Command policy — announced by City Fire Chief Sam Wilson and City Manager John Salomone in August 2025 — within five business days, or face suspension.
The city says if they fail to comply, and are suspended, the city will implement emergency staffing and oversight measures" for each of the departments, covering each of the three fire districts with paid city firefighters.
At the Taftville fire station, the city would operate a city substation — staffing it with paid firefighters as a "strategic location to support Norwich residents."
City Manager John Salomone, in a statement in the release, said the city has given the departments every opportunity to return to service under Unified Command, which he described as "a collaborative model."
"Unfortunately, we have reached a point where further delay would be negligent disregard for public safety. The city has a legal and moral obligation to act when baseline safety benchmarks are not reached."
The notices come a little more than three months after the city shut down Yantic Fire Engine Co. No. 1 for failing to comply with the policy, which aimed to unify the city's fragmented fire services through the creation of a new operational command structure with Wilson at the top, and standardized training, communications and emergency response protocols for both paid and volunteer fire services in the city.
Shortly after Yantic was shut down and its city-owned fire trucks were taken away, Yantic, Laurel Hill, Occum and Taftville sued Wilson and Salomone, challenging their authority under the city charter to implement the policy. The East Great Plain volunteer department has not challenged the policy.
On Tuesday, the three chiefs whose departments now face a shutdown, issued the following statement.
"Today’s notice from the City demanding that the Laurel Hill, Taftville, and Occum Volunteer Fire Departments sign its Consolidated Command agreement or be suspended is the latest move to replace volunteer fire service with an entirely paid, unionized career department in Norwich at the cost of millions of dollars in new expenditures to accomplish their agenda," the statement said. "We look forward to the court deciding whether the City and Chief Wilson have the legal authority to bypass the City Charter and the will of Norwich voters by imposing sweeping structural changes through executive order rather than through the process required by law."
Since then, the city and volunteers have issued statements through their public relations firms while their lawyers have attempted to resolve the issue through mediation. The volunteers have said they do not want to give up what they have called their autonomy to command emergency calls in their districts even though the city pays for most of their equipment and maintenance.
"Since August 2025, we have made it clear to the volunteer organizations that immediate action is needed to unify emergency response services in Norwich," Wilson said. "These efforts have been met with disregard resulting in multiple documented failures to respond to calls from our residents. Until they are able to meet basic training requirements and adhere to unified communication protocols, the city will ensure residents receive the professional emergency coverage they deserve."
City officials have recently pointed several instances of calls that went unattended by the volunteer departments, and that Unified Command, which they claim would unite the fire services into one strong, combination department, is in the interest of public safety.
According to the city's Tuesday release: "After months of negotiation, mediation, and documented warnings regarding systemic response failures, city officials said it has become clear that there would not be a timely resolution that balanced public safety with strengthening emergency response."
"Those deficiencies recently culminated in several high-profile failures, including incidents where stations failed to respond to life-threatening emergencies and fatal accidents," the release said.
This part of the release is in reference to a series of emergency incidents pointed out recently by the Norwich firefighters' union and city, which have been used as justification for the Unified Command policy.
Three weeks ago the Norwich firefighters' union called attention to an accident that occurred on Interstate 395 in the Occum fire district, which resulted in the death of a Massachusetts man. Occum Fire Chief Scott Eggert explained that Occum personnel, who did not show up to the scene throughout the call, did not receive alerts that should have been sent via their third-party phone notification system, while many firefighters were not carrying their city-issued pagers.
One week ago, the city put out a release that cited three more instances it said demonstrated "the fragility of the current fragmented system." According to the May 12 release, Wilson that day had issued a formal letter to the city's volunteer chiefs "documenting a series of "critical operation failures that have created an imminent public safety crisis," including the Occum incident and three others where there had been "delayed or incomplete responses to life-threatening emergencies, failures to engage with established communications procedures, and inconsistent use of vital Computer-Aided Dispatch (CAD) technology."
The release said: On May 4, the Taftville department was unable to respond to two separate emergency calls due to a lack of personnel, which it said required the Norwich Fire Department to send fire trucks. On April 12, in the Occum district, a fatal accident response was significantly delayed, and the dispatch system had inaccurately recognized a command officer in a personal vehicle as a response by a staffed truck. On April 9, the city department was excluded from the initial dispatch to a fatal accident on West Thames Street, but was dispatched later and still made it to the scene before the volunteers originally assigned to the call.
Wilson, in the release said the incidents were not isolated, but symptoms of a structural system failure, and that his goal remained to have a "harmonious, unified operation where the closest and most capable resources are dispatched automatically."
Laurel Hill Chief Aaron Westervelt, Taftville Chief Timothy Jencks and Occum Chief Eggert, in a joint statement argued the recent public statements issued by the city and Wilson — along with Norwich Fire Fighters Local 892 and the Uniformed Professional Fire Fighters Association of CT — present an "incomplete, misleading, and operationally inaccurate narrative regarding the volunteer fire service system in Norwich."
They said the city, Chief Wilson, and Local 892 leadership have attempted to publicly portray isolated incidents as evidence of systemic failure of the volunteer fire service while ignoring significant operational realities, longstanding communications deficiencies, CAD and MDT failures, unilateral operational changes, infrastructure problems, and dispatch limitations that have been repeatedly identified for months and, in some cases, years.
"Today’s notice from the City demanding that the Laurel Hill, Taftville, and Occum Volunteer Fire Departments sign its Consolidated Command agreement or be suspended is the latest move to replace volunteer fire service with an entirely paid, unionized career department in Norwich at the cost of millions of dollars in new expenditures to accomplish their agenda," the statement said. "We look forward to the court deciding whether the City and Chief Wilson have the legal authority to bypass the City Charter and the will of Norwich voters by imposing sweeping structural changes through executive order rather than through the process required by law.
Eggert, Westervelt and Jencks could not be reached Tuesday for comment.
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