MONROE — According to Scott Kivet, it all comes down to one thing: making sure residents have adequate fire protection coverage 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Kivet, 30, was recently elected to a seat on the Monroe Township Fire District 1 Board of Commissioners. His election came one month after Lonnie Pipero, chief of the Monroe Township Volunteer Fire Company No. 1, suspended Kivet from his volunteer firefighting duties. Kivet was suspended for circulating a petition to stop the layoffs of the company’s two paid firefighters.
Kivet, the company’s deputy chief, has no regrets about supporting the paid firefighters.
“It’s about making sure residents get the best fire protection they can get,” he said. “If they don’t have anyone [covering] before 3:30 p.m., it may not be adequate.” Volunteers are more available later in the day, he said.
“Before 3:30 p.m., it’s a different story,” he said.
Ironically, it was Kivet’s father, Jeffrey, who started the paid firefighter program about 10 years ago.
“There was a fire at the fire chief’s house,” Kivet said. “They had to wait many, many minutes for mutual aid. It’s no different then and now. It’s consistently inconsistent during the day. If it can happen, it will happen. As of 3:30 p.m., they are covered. Before,….”
Kivet is appealing his suspension, which was still in effect earlier this week.
“I have not been reinstated as of this time,” he said. “Every fire company outside of Monroe is begging me to go there, so I’ve been riding with them. If there’s a big fire, I go anywhere.”
For now, he is riding with the Plainsboro Fire Company. But his status with the Monroe department is hard to take for a man who literally grew up in the firehouse with his father during the 1980s. He became a junior member of the fire company at age 16.
“I loved it,” Kivet said. “It was my biggest clubhouse. It was great. All of the people running around with all that adrenaline. It was like they were superheroes.”
Kivet will be sworn in as commissioner at the next fire district meeting, which starts at 7 p.m. March 17.
The District 1 Board of Fire Commissioners voted 4-1 at its Feb. 17 meeting to lay off the two paid firefighters, Michael Mangeri and David Shapter, effective March 5.
“The board has determined that the costs of maintaining full-time paid firefighters to supplement the fire protection services provided by the district’s highly skilled and dedicated volunteer firefighters exceed the benefits derived and is economically burdensome and unwarranted in these times of severe economic hardship and distress,” according to the resolution. Terminating the two positions will result in “substantial cost savings,” it states.
Not true, according to Kivet.
“What’s going on is totally not right,” he said. “There is no budget issue. They are buying a $140,000 brush truck. There needs to be accountability on the business side of the fire district.”
The two paid firefighters make roughly $58,000 a year, with benefits.
“These are the nicest guys in the world,” Kivet said of Mangeri and Shapter. “They wouldn’t hurt a fly. They have never been written up. It’s absolutely asinine how this happened.”
Kivet said he decided to run for a commissioner’s seat at the urging of other fire company members.
“I kind of knew I was going to win,” he said. “People are very, very upset. I didn’t even do my own campaigning. Other people did my campaigning. They are mad about what’s going on. They wanted me to run for fire commissioner. It gave me more incentive to run.”
Kivet, a fire coordinator with the Middlesex County Fire Marshal’s Office, manages major fires with local fire chiefs.
James Grande, union president for the Monroe’s 52 career firefighters, has said the union is “outraged” at the decision to lay off the two men. The union had already filed unfair labor practice charges with the state Public Employment Relations Commission before the commissioners voted for the layoffs. The charges were filed in light of the threat to eliminate career firefighters, Grande has said.
For now, Kivet said he will keep riding the trucks, just not in his own town.
“It’s tough,” he said. “Thank God for the other fire companies. They were all offering me applications — Plainsboro, Spotswood, East Brunswick. Right now, I’m riding with Plainsboro. It hurts. It’s killing me. I really think I built that place.”