PARIS — Selectmen voted to accept $5,500 in donations to the Paris Fire Department on the condition that Fire Chief Brad Frost provide a report on how the money will be spent.

In September, the department received $5,000 from NEPW Logistics and $500 from Coromoto Minerals as a “thank you” for help the department provided. The selectmen must vote to accept such donations.

“Call it accountability, whatever you want, I just want to understand, at some point someone explains to us how the money is spent,” Chairman Ted Kurtz said.

“I’m just not sure why we’re asking them to do that, because it’s not tax money,” Selectman Jean Smart said.

Selectman Robert Kirchherr moved that selectmen accept the money, “with the understanding that (Frost) will provide us with detailed information on how it’s spent.”

NEPW Logistics donated $5,000 for the Fire Department’s help in extinguishing a blaze at the warehouse on Pine Street in 2008. According to a letter from NEPW President Drew Gilman, the insurer of the contractor who was welding in the building when the fire started never paid the Paris Fire Department for its bills.

“This hardly seems fair to me,” Gilman wrote. “And although my company was the innocent victim of this fire, I still feel that the department should somehow be rewarded for their hard work back on those cold days of December 2008.”

According to a letter to the board from Frost, the department never received money to replenish materials used in that fire. He said the department would use part of the money to buy buckets of foam and to replace two broken radio head sets in the ladder truck.

Coromoto Minerals gave the department $500 as thanks for serving as the rescue team for its mine on Mt. Mica Road.

treaves@sunjournal.com

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