Amid Tensions in Norwich, CT, Fire Department Closures, Council Mulls Vote of 'No Confidence' in City Manager  

A resolution on next week’s City Council agenda will ask councilors to consider a vote of no confidence in City Manager John Salomone.

According to the resolution, which was placed on the agenda by Republican Aldermen Peter Nystrom and Bill Nash, there would not be any immediate action against Salomone, who has been the city manager since 2016.

Salomone said Friday that the effort has upset him, adding that he was deeply disappointed in Nystrom for taking this approach.

“I thought I’d given the city a lot of positive things,” he said.

Nystrom and Nash were among those who voted to appoint Salomone 10 years ago.

Nystrom, who served as mayor for eight years with Salomone, said Friday that their relationship was always grounded in mutual respect.

“He was my sounding board,” Nystrom said. “I would call him, confide in him about things. We would go back and forth. We really built a great relationship in that way, because of trust.”

But he added, “We don’t have a relationship right now.”

Nystrom said the relationship has fractured due to Salomone’s handling of the city’s fire services issue. Specifically, he said the city manager ignored his input on the issue, something he said Salomone had never done before.

“Something broke in him. That’s my belief. He’s doing things that aren’t John. ... I still care about the guy. I do,” he said.

Criticisms of Salomone by volunteer firefighters and their supporters began last August, when he and the city fire chief, Sam Wilson, unveiled the Unified Command policy — a citywide fire policy that has sought to unify the paid and volunteer services by establishing a new command structure with Wilson at the top, and by standardizing training, communications and emergency response protocols across the fire services. The Yantic, Taftville, Occum and Laurel Hill departments sued the city, challenging Salomone and Wilson’s authority under the city charter to implement the policy.

In February, the city shut down the Yantic volunteer fire department and repossessed its city-owned fire trucks for failing to agree to the policy. Some critics of Salomone and Wilson have called for them to be fired.

Nystrom is among those who have charged that Salomone and Wilson are trying to replace the volunteers with paid firefighters.

“We think he’s handled this completely wrong,” Nystrom said. “It’s going to harm the city. It’s going to lead to a higher cost of living. The volunteers are a major asset to the city. They have been for many, many decades.”

Nystrom criticized Salomone on Friday for “walking away” from his role as mediator between the paid and volunteer fire departments, leaving Wilson, with one year of experience in Norwich, to deal with the dispute.

Salomone “was the key to getting them to work together, and he walked away from it,” Nystrom said. “He refuses to sit down and work with the chiefs. And that’s his job.”

Nystrom said the resolution is intended to result not in Salomone’s firing but in a public discussion before the council of his performance in regard to the fire services.

Nystrom and Nash said they are not questioning the rest of Salomone’s work.

“He has been a very good city manager,” Nystrom said. “But this issue has caused such division and anger, and people are very sad as well.”

Nash said Salomone has done a tremendous job handling budgets and contracts but said his leadership is absent with the firefighting issue.

“And at this point, I don’t have any confidence that he can fix this,” he said.

Nash said the intention of the vote is to give Salomone notice that people disagree with how he’s handled the issue.

“Maybe it’s a shot across the bow to straighten up,” Nash said.

But Council President Pro Tempore Joe Delucia, a Democrat, called Monday’s vote “a cowardly act.”

“It is a cowardly act for the purposes of the political theater and nothing else,” he said.

Delucia stated that he didn’t know whether Monday’s performance review of Salomone was legal under the city charter.

“It doesn’t include due process,” he said. “It’s a vote of the council, without (Salomone) being able to respond to the grievances against him. This is a personnel matter. He deserves to have (legal) counsel.”

© 2026 The Day (New London, Conn.). Visit www.theday.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.