This week, The Beachcomber has a front-page story about good governance.

The article details how Vashon’s Health Care District has quietly worked, over the past several months, to come several steps closer to its goal to build a new primary care clinic on Vashon, located close to town on Vashon Highway — and to possibly be able to do so without raising levy tax rates.

We applaud the work of the district’s commissioners, as well as the work of a task force they have assembled to help tackle this monumental and much-needed improvement to Vashon’s healthcare landscape.

What the district has accomplished, thus far, provides an example of good government and community resilience at every level: from Sen. Patty Murray’s support of the project by requesting a federal allocation of $5 million dollars for the project, to the news that the district is now working with a “generous islander” to purchase prime real estate on Vashon at below-market value as a site for a modern clinic that will be more accessible to all.

Unfortunately, another story on our front page this week tells a different story about another public agency: Vashon Island Fire & Rescue, once again, appears to be in crisis.

Fire Chief Charles Krimmert is now on paid administrative leave for two weeks, effective June 30 through July 14, pending an investigation to be conducted by the district’s attorney, Eric Quinn.

The investigation stems from a letter, signed by the four fire captains of the district, detailing their extreme dissatisfaction with Krimmert’s leadership and requesting that he either resign or be released from his duties as chief. (See page 1.)

The crisis at VIFR has been developing for some time and is multifaceted.

As far back as late 2019, the fire board asked Jim Walkowski, a revered fire chief and former president of the Washington Fire Chief’s Association, to evaluate and analyze the challenges facing VIFR at that time, and make recommendations to improve its operations.

Walkowski’s 17-page report, written after extensive interviews with VIFR members and submitted to the board on Nov. 27, 2019, outlined significant problems in leadership at all levels of the organization.

These included, Walkowski wrote, a “lack of trust between all levels of organization [that] resonated through nearly every interview, regardless of position, rank, and/or tenure.”

Walkowski’s report stated that “many members feel the organization has a toxic environment and behaviors supportive of a hostile workplace are not being dealt with properly.”

He detailed that charges of arbitrary discipline, potential gender bias, the use of excessive profanity in the station, and unfair treatment of some employees and volunteers as having led him to the conviction that VIFR was “subject to significant risk by enabling this type of behavior.”

Significantly — and at the very top of his report — Walkowski also detailed numerous reforms that needed to be taken at the board level of VIFR.

The board of VIFR, he wrote, needed more firm standards regarding rules and conduct. Walkowski also noted that elected board members had micro-managed chief officers in operational-level decisions, leading to hierarchical confusion.

“Organizational leadership commences with top hierarchy, in this case, the Board of Fire Commissioners,” he wrote.

Sadly, many of the serious problems detailed in Walkowski’s report are still in evidence in the district.

In March, VIFR’s board chair Andy Johnson resigned, citing a lack of civility among some members of the board, a “massive” increase in the volume of email communication about board business and “a level of rancor in these communications that had made managing the day-to-day business of VIFR much more difficult.”

The Beachcomber has also been the recipient of numerous heated emails from new commissioner John Simonds. Some of the emails, sent in the weeks following his election and installment on the board, and copied to commissioners and staff, disparaged Krimmert and questioned his qualifications for his job in divisive and dismissive language. Thankfully, these types of emails from Simonds have stopped in recent months.

But as recently as April 7, The Beachcomber editorialized about the conduct at a public meeting when the board voted to instruct the chief to increase staffing levels.

“The meeting’s combative tone continued until its end, to the point that it was cringe-inducing to watch,” we wrote. “Anger, sarcasm, exasperation and lecturing are commonplace tools of some meeting participants, including Chief Krimmert,” we wrote.

This isn’t the way it should be. We know that VIFR’s members, including the chief, would like to achieve the highest aims of the department, including its financial solvency and effectiveness in ensuring public health and safety on Vashon.

Jim Walkowski provided a blueprint, back in 2019, of how to do that. It’s time for the board and staff to return to that document, without pointing fingers at each other as being completely to blame for all the district’s dysfunctionality.

Good governance — as our calm and steadfast Health Care District has shown — is possible. We hope for and need the same kind of community-minded leadership in our fire district.