The Van Buren Volunteer Fire Department has agreed to a settlement with the Brown County Commissioners which is intended to dissolve the fire department and unfreeze Brown County’s grant money at the state level.

The agreement took effect May 10. The Van Buren Volunteer Fire Department agreed to legally dissolve in exchange for a $77,545.60 settlement from the county.

A little over $40,000 of that is for the county to buy the equipment that’s still in the Van Buren fire station. The other $36,745.60 will go toward paying off the legal bills that Van Buren VFD still owes for a years-long court battle with the Van Buren Township trustee, according to the settlement agreement.

The two remaining Van Buren VFD board members, Bonnie Closey and Jane Donaldson, said they’re sad that the fire department, founded in 1976, ended like this, but they’re relieved that the struggle is over.

“I am sorrowful that we had to go this way, that something that was established in our township — which we don’t have much established there — is now a thing of the past,” said Donaldson, whose husband’s grandfather was a VFD founder.

“I look at as I’m sad we couldn’t get it done, but sometimes you have to look at maybe it’s just a door … and this will help people see some stuff,” Closey said.

The county commissioners had the keys to the fire station in hand on May 10. “It’s done. It’s over,” commissioner Diana Biddle said.

She’d said she hoped the county would be back in OCRA’s good graces within a week or so, so they could restart some economic development and stormwater grant applications which had been on hold.

OCRA Communications Manager Melissa Thomas said on May 11 that the office was waiting for final documentation of the settlement to be submitted and reviewed. “If all the regulations have been met, we will send a final approval letter,” she said. “The county will be eligible for future OCRA grants once the letter has been issued.”

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From April 2015 until July 2017, the Van Buren VFD and the Van Buren Township trustee’s office were locked in a legal battle about control of the fire station and fire department affairs, the release of documents and allegations of breach of contract. It snowballed around the time the VFD moved into the new station in the fall of 2014.

The trustee’s office started withholding the fire department’s $16,000 in annual contract money and the VFD filed a lawsuit. In the meantime, the volunteer firefighters struggled to pay bills through fundraisers and to keep making fire runs with extremely limited manpower.

In July, the Van Buren Township board severed its contract with the Van Buren VFD to end the lawsuit, and created a new volunteer fire department, Southern Brown, to cover the territory that Van Buren used to serve.

Southern Brown has been operating out of a pole barn owned by one of the fire board members near the Brown-Jackson county line, while the Van Buren fire station, across State Road 135 South from Van Buren Elementary, remained in the hands of the Van Buren VFD.

The Van Buren VFD retained control of the building because the $400,000 grant used to build it was written in the county commissioners’ name, and the fire department, not the township, was the grant subrecipient. The fire department’s name also was on the deed to the land where the building stands.

However, the Indiana Office of Community and Rural Affairs stopped recognizing Van Buren VFD as a functioning fire department in July, when its contract was severed. Because of that, OCRA told the county commissioners in December that they were in violation of the $400,000 grant agreement, because it said that the building had to remain an active fire station for five years — until October 2019.

In February, OCRA reported that it had put Brown County’s ability to receive certain grant funding from OCRA and the Indiana Housing and Community Development Authority on hold until the fire station situation was resolved.

When the building is returned to an “eligible use” as defined by OCRA, the clock will start ticking again on that five-year minimum use period, said Eric Ogle, director of OCRA’s Community Development Block Grant program, in February. It will be up to the commissioners to determine what to do with the building after the five years have passed, he said.

Biddle said the next steps in this process include the commissioners meeting with Van Buren Township Trustee Vicki Payne and leasing the building to her. Then, the township’s advisory board could allow the new volunteer fire department, Southern Brown, to use it, she said.

Payne said she planned to have a meeting at the station at 8 a.m. Thursday, May 17 to make changes to the fire protection contract with Southern Brown.

As part of the settlement, the county commissioners agreed to hold the title of the fire station and the real estate in the county’s name for at least 25 years; however, the county can lease it to another entity, Biddle said.

Though the Van Buren VFD had only one active firefighter left, he and the board were still trying to work on ways it could be an active department up until the beginning of this year.

However, Van Buren VFD’s board didn’t want to see the county be put at risk of losing federal and state money because of this dispute, which is why its lawyer reached out to the commissioners on Feb. 20 to offer to transfer the building’s title, according to a letter between the parties.

That letter followed a Feb. 13 public meeting at the fire station, at which the fire board and county commissioner Jerry Pittman pledged to talk through the issues and come up with a resolution.

If it didn’t return the building to an eligible use like an active fire station, the county would have had to pay back all or some of the $400,000 grant, OCRA said.

In its negotiation with the county, the Van Buren VFD had asked for six months to dispose of the property in the building through the Indiana Volunteer Firefighters Association, plus protection from any further prosecution.

The county agreed to pay the fire department $40,800 for the building’s contents and asked for the fire department to be dissolved, according to letters between the parties’ attorneys. The legal indemnity request also was accepted.

Of the $77,545.60 the county agreed to pay to Van Buren VFD, $36,745.60 is going to pay off what the VFD still owed to attorney John P. Cook. As of March 22, he was owed a total of $61,242.66, the letters said.

When the fire department settled with Van Buren Township last July, that agreement also included a settlement, of $64,050 from the township. Closey and Donaldson said that money went toward paying down the lawyer’s bill, which was over $100,000; paying back loans given to the fire department from supporters during the time they had no contract money; and doing necessary repairs to one of the fire trucks.

From 2015 to 2017, Van Buren Township paid 86,046.82 in attorney and mediator fees on its side, plus the $64,050 settlement to the fire department, according to budget reports posted on Indiana Gateway.

In 2017, the township also bought $98,497.01 worth of firefighting equipment for Southern Brown Volunteer Fire Department with the cumulative fire fund.

All of that money comes from township taxpayers.