Meehan, Rescue make headway at LES meet

Ex-assistant chief and former Lebanon selectman Jason Cole, left, quizzes new Fire and Rescue Chief Dan Meehan over what Cole characterized as recent fire department response issues during Saturday\\'s meeting at LES. (Lebanon Voice/Harrison Thorp photo

LEBANON - Nearly 150 people packed a meeting Saturday for a "Meet and Greet" with newly hired Lebanon Fire and Rescue Chief Dan Meehan, but after a week of innuendo and misinformation in the mainstream press and on multiple dubious Facebook Pages, Meehan was forced to play defense, explaining to residents downgrading of the town's ambulance service, the resignation or firing of the town's only two paramedics and the discovery of unaccounted for painkillers in one of the town's ambulances.

Meehan, clad in a white shirt with black long-length coat, pants and tie, opened his 25-minute speech with a brief history of his firefighting career and summation of all the allegations that have swirled around him wrought by sometimes surreptitious, anonymous voices, then followed that with explanations for his actions.

First, he said he accepted the use of the 2010 Ford Explorers in lieu of payment for the Rescue Chief $1,200 monthly stipend. He only gets the $1,200 stipend for Fire Chief. He said he never uses the SUV for personal use, and it is available for other Rescue business. Also, he lives close to the Lebanon line on Milton Road in Rochester, and he has used it for Lebanon calls he can get to faster than anybody else.

Second, he said the paramedic license was removed because the town ambulances have no IV pumps, which are required to carry the paramedic-level license. He said an IV pump had somehow been inserted for a September Maine EMS inspection, but a purchase order was never found and the IV pump has since disappeared. He surmises it was temporarily "planted" in the ambulance to pass inspection. He said operating at a paramedic level with no IV pumps could lead to the town to losing its ambulance license completely.

A packed crowd at Lebanon Elementary School during a mostly civil Q and A during the public participation portion of the meeting.

He also said both paramedics Lebanon used lived out of town and one paramedic took 41 minutes to get to a call, which is unacceptable. He also said training records were unverifiable for one paramedic, and one paramedic was caught using town equipment for personal gain.

In short, he said shoring up the department, which is fraught with OSHA and other Maine EMS procedural deficiencies, is the first step before the town can entertain getting back its paramedic-level ambulance service.

Two IV pumps - one for each ambulance - would cost about $5,000, but Selectmen Chairman Ben Thompson emphasized there is no funding available for them until voters go to the polls in June, because right now Rescue is still funded by a depleted Enterprise Account which will be shut down June 30 per Lebanon voters decision at the polls in January.

Third, Meehan had to clarify a story that ran in the Foster's Daily Democrat on Saturday about a bottle of painkiller liquid found in the back of one of the town's ambulances during a routine cleaning.

Saying the reporter was a little "confused," he said that the partially opened bottle of fentanyl painkiller was traced to a paramedic from an out-of-town service who had inadvertently left the bottle after serving as a paramedic intercept on a call.

In the Foster's story, Meehan commented that as he delved into the department's supply controls, the quantity of some medications on internal records did not match the numbers on the inventoried bottles.

Some residents took this to imply that somehow there were concerns that some volunteers were skimming meds from ambulance stock, but Meehan, himself, made no mention of such issues on Saturday, instead heaping praise on volunteer's dedication and help in making the combined departments work.

Meehan said when the bottle of fentanyl was brought to him, he simply called Maine EMS to ask what the proper procedure was. He said he was told to report the incident to State Police, which he did and then called Southern Maine Health Care in Sanford to see if they could trace the bottle's origin, which they couldn't do, he said. He asked them what he should do with it and was told to dispose of it, he said. Later it was discovered that a paramedic had simply left it in the ambulance.

Meehan concluded his talk by saying in his department he will allow "no shenanigans and won't hide facts," which drew thunderous applause from all.

Deborah Dorey Wilson of Bigelow Road in Lebanon speaks in support of new chief Dan Meehan during Saturday's meeting.

After the speech during a public participation segment, several audience members took to the microphone to praise Meehan's work during his short tenure as combined chief and later to openly fume about the negativity heaped on the Rescue Department in the past week by Facebook pages controlled by former selectman and assistant rescue chief Jason Cole.

For his part, Cole argues that a group of volunteers including him run the pages, which include but are not limited to Lebanon Maine Community News and Lebanon Rescue Department - Command Central.

Many residents openly bashed Cole's pages, but one resident said the official Rescue Facebook Page, Lebanon Rescue Department Official, has also been openly negative and in poor taste recently.

A chagrined Meehan offered to take the official page down to Cole's wild applause, but others in the audience decried that would only leave Cole's pages intact and just lead to more misinformation and further roiling of townsfolk.

In the end Meehan vowed to make sure nothing negative goes on the "Official" page and to look into the possibility of preventing "commenting" on Facebook posts, which is often where the most vitriol and abuse is found.

Cole, meanwhile, who along with his wife, former Rescue Chief Samantha Cole, resigned under a cloud of suspicion at the end of last year, are thought to have led to the hemorrhaging of more than $200,000 from the department's Enterprise Account due to shoddy and careless record keeping and billing procedures.

At Saturday's meeting Cole was collecting signatures for three citizen's petitions, including a selectmen's recall petition, a petition to make the Fire and Rescue chief an elected position and one to keep town vehicles like the one Meehan is using garaged in Lebanon.