Lake Placid Volunteer Fire Department Chief Torry Hoffman answers Lake Placid Elementary School kindergarteners’ and first-graders’ questions about fire safety after a tour of the firehouse in October 2022. (Enterprise photo — Lauren Yates)

LAKE PLACID — The Lake Placid village Board of Trustees held an emergency special meeting last week to approve a new, but incomplete, slate of officers for the Lake Placid Volunteer Fire Department.

The special meeting came a month after the fire department held a contentious annual election that left two officer positions vacant — including the fire chief — and brought debate over the department’s bylaws.

LPVFD holds its officer elections — for fire chief, two assistant chiefs and four captains — at its April meeting every year. Though the department is owned by the village and new officers must be approved by the village Board of Trustees, LPVFD is a private entity that holds internal ballot-based elections. This year, most officer positions were filled in the department’s election on Tuesday, April 4. However, fire Chief Torry Hoffman and Captain Arron Barney were not reelected, and no one else was nominated for their positions in the election — meaning their positions were technically left vacant.

What happens when an officer is not reelected — but when no one is nominated to fill the vacant position — became the subject of debate among fire department members, according to longtime member Liane Colby. While some members expected the chain of command to automatically move up with the new vacancies, according to Colby — with the first assistant fire chief moving up to fire chief, the second assistant chief moving up to first assistant, and so on — Colby said that the department’s bylaws state that Hoffman should remain as the acting fire chief until he could be replaced, or until another chief could be elected by the department. The automatic moving-up process anticipated by some department members would only happen in the case that Hoffman left the department entirely, Colby said.

The fire chief vacancy and one captain position will be up for election at the department’s next meeting on June, according to Colby. If a current officer is elected for one of the vacant positions, that officer’s previous position would also be filled that night.

Last month, Colby said there was a feeling during the April elections that a portion of the fire department’s members were “up to something” — that a faction of members had strategically planned to trigger the moving-up process by not reelecting Hoffman and not nominating another chief. However, Colby said this was a misunderstanding of the department’s bylaws, which were clarified by the department’s lawyer at LPVFD’s monthly meeting last week.

“If the first assistant chief wanted to be chief, (they) should have run for chief,” Colby said.

While the village board first asked LPVFD to provide a complete list of new officers for approval, according to Colby, the village scheduled its last-minute emergency meeting this past Wednesday to approve the incomplete list after learning that new officers must be approved within 30 days of the department’s election. Once a new chief and captain are elected in June, the village will have 30 days to approve the two positions.

The officers elected in April’s election include Michael St. Louis as first assistant chief, Jennifer Marshall as second assistant chief, and Byron Skeels, Josh Pelkey and Gavin Martin as the first, second and third captains, respectively.

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CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story included an incorrect spelling of Arron Barney’s name. The Enterprise regrets the error.