Court Orders Negotiations Over Prison Fire Contract

The city of Airway Heights has forced a prison within its city limits to the negotiating table after the city let a $100,000-per-year fire protection contract lapse roughly a year ago.

A Superior Court judge ruled Jan.

21 that theAirway Heights Correction Center must work with the city to resolve disagreements. Officials from both sides say they hope to reach an accord quickly.

Spokane County Fire District 10, which covers unincorporated West Plains areas, has assumed the contract with the prison during the interim. The contract is for firefighting and emergency medical response to the prison.

Frustrated city officials allowed the contract to expire rather than accept the prison’s offer to extend again at the old contract rate, according to council member Dale Perry.

“You can’t just keep extending a contract,” Perry said.

The city’s new, proposed contract asked for a $15,000 annual increase.

“To me it’s like an insurance policy,” Perry said. “You hope they never have to use it, but you pay for it in case you need it.”

But prison officials didn’t think the city’s volunteer fire department was up to the job, according to prison spokesman Cly Evans.

“That’s really what the issue was - actually - performance,” he said. “We need them to be trained adequately, be prepared and be ready to respond.”

In court documents, prison officials cited numerous fire department mishaps they said indicated incompetence. During a 1995 firefighting drill, for instance, firefighters bungled the scenario so badly they eventually ran out of air for their self-contained breathing apparatus. In 1996, the fire department responded to a building fire but allegedly waited four hours on-scene before dousing the fire. The building burned to the ground, and the city was sued for $1.3 million by the building’s owner, Airway Heights council member Claude Hicks. The case was thrown out of court in December, but Hicks said he will appeal.

In 1998, an emergency medical team rushed to assist a heart attack victim at the prison, only to find that the team’s defibrillator, a device used to jolt a heart into beating, did not work because of a dead battery.

The prison also took exception to the fact that two volunteer firefighters hired in 1997 had been convicted of felonies.

“When we have a crisis in the correctional facility, we don’t want to be questioning where people’s alliances are,” Evans said.

One of those volunteers, convicted of assaulting a police officer in 1978, resigned from the fire department when officials discovered his background. Another, previously convicted of arson, was fired.

The extensions, prison officials said, provided the city time to address problems.

The city has done that, Perry said.

Meanwhile, the city is pursuing damages against the Department of Corrections, seeking $110,000 in revenue lost because it did not have last year’s contract. Airway Heights officials say that lost revenue has impacted the city budget.