Mediating a mess
It can't be much fun being Roderick Fraser Jr., the Boston fire commissioner who is receiving a daily crash course in serving at the center of dysfunction.
The latest salvo in Fraser's war with the Fire Department's union came yesterday when the president of Local 718, Edward Kelly, posted a scathing letter on the union's website declaring that "Rod Fraser will never have the respect of the firefighters who put their lives on the line every day and understand the hell that Warren Payne and Paul Cahill went through."
Payne and Cahill died fighting a fierce blaze in West Roxbury last summer, and a board of inquiry concluded last week that they were not impaired during the fire. However, the board did not review toxicology reports that, according to officials briefed on the reports, showed that Payne had traces of cocaine in his system and that Cahill's blood alcohol level was .27, triple the legal limit.
Fraser rejected the board's conclusion out of hand. It was, he said, an inquiry that refused to address the central question of what contributed to the deaths.
Yesterday, the commissioner was reluctant to engage in more public sparring with the men and women under his command. Clearly seeking to be conciliatory, he said he agreed with many of the recommendations in the report about how to improve the safety of firefighters.
He sounded isolated and a bit beleaguered. Running the department has clearly been more of a challenge than he envisioned.
Fraser said he did not see how the board's conclusions made sense. "I think if you're legally drunk you're impaired," he said in a phone interview. "If not, why would we have drunk driving laws? It's been proven that if you are under the influence, your judgment and decision-making and motor skills are impaired. I would have been happy if they had reached no conclusion, but they definitively stated that there was no impairment, and I don't see how you can say that."
The panel said autopsy and toxicology reports were unavailable. Those documents were under control of the Suffolk district attorney's office, which scoffed at the notion that the reports, whose contents were leaked long ago, were withheld. "We would have no reason to withhold that information," Jake Wark, a spokesman for the office said yesterday.
This very ugly battle is taking place as the firefighters' contract negotiation is headed for mediation this week. One of the issues at the heart of the city-union impasse has been drug and alcohol testing, city officials insist.
Of course, the union maintains that is not so, because it will not acknowledge that drug and alcohol use is a problem. Kelly said the union is willing to negotiate random testing, but he was more enthusiastic in talking about the establishment of a unit dedicated to dealing with hazardous materials.
While his lack of firefighting experience is regularly tossed in his face, the real problem for Fraser, which has been apparent for some time, is that the department is stridently resistant to being run by an outsider. The department is unusual in that even high-ranking officials are members of the same union as the men and women they command. This creates a divide, with the commissioner on one side and almost all of the department on the other.
The investigation into the West Roxbury fire is in shambles. Yesterday, neither Fraser nor Kelly could say what happens next, which means it is very possible that nothing will happen. At the same time, the outcome of mediation is anyone's guess, too.
No one is attempting to besmirch the memories of two firefighters who died in the line of duty, two men whose families must grieve their loss every day. But it is important to know why they died.
Their deaths have opened a window into the soul of the department, and that department is a mess. The public safety consequences are obvious, and unsettling. The union is in denial, and the commissioner looks like a man without a country. That's an awful lot to mediate.
Adrian Walker is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at walker@globe.com. 