Potential Misuse Of Clarendon Hills Money: Ex-Firefighter

CLARENDON HILLS, IL – Clarendon Hills' fire chief was warned about fire department members signing in for calls unnecessarily and wasting taxpayers' money, village emails show.

Hours after the village put Fire Chief Brian Leahy on paid administrative leave this week, officials announced a new policy curtailing what is known as "callbacks."

For years, paid-on-call department members could return to work for most calls. But Scott Pilafas, a firefighter and paramedic who resigned in early 2022, emailed the chief a few times over the years about what he saw as abuse of the policy.

In a December 2020 email, Pilafas told Leahy he had witnessed members coming in for callbacks to sign in and then immediately leave. In doing so, he said, they would get paid for stopping by the station.

He also said he had seen people sign in long after the call was over.

"It's frustrating for the Firefighter/Paramedics that respond to all the calls when we pull back into the station and have 5-10 (paid-on-call) members sitting around doing nothing, making more than we did to run the call," Pilafas said.

Callbacks, Pilafas said, are unnecessary because the department has four members on duty.

"The antiquated process of callbacks is not a wise investment in village dollars when you add up what has been spent for this process," he said in the email. "Beyond the potential misuse of village funds, it is extremely damaging to the morale of the department ... and has caused a longtime divide."

According to his email, paid-on-call members who respond to four calls during a 12-hour shift make more money than a person who worked the full shift and actually handled the calls.

In March 2017, Pilafas emailed the chief about an incident in which he responded to a concern about a beeping carbon dioxide detector in an older person's home. He went by to look and met with the person's caretaker. It turned out the detector was beyond its useful life.

When he returned to the station, two higher-ranking members asked him why other members' pagers did not activate so that they could answer the call.

Pilafas told them he had taken care of it. One of the higher-ranking members asked whether Pilafas had put the member's name on the report for the call on the detector. If he had, that would have meant the higher-ranking member would get compensated, Pilafas said.

"You were not on the call, your pager never went off, so you should not get paid," Pilafas said he told the higher-ranking member.

Pilafas said the other member yelled back, "I will come to whatever call I want, even trouble alarms. If you have a problem, take it up with the chief."

In the email, Pilafas said he wanted to involve human resources because he felt threatened by the higher-ranking member.

"Call reports are legal documents and if something happened, people should not be recorded as (being) on calls that they were not present for," Pilafas said. "Not to mention, getting paid for a call that was long completed and documented."

Asked about the longtime callback policy Thursday, Village Manager Zach Creer said the village's concern was the dual mandate of providing public safety and fulfilling the village's fiduciary responsibilities.

"I would never issue an order that I believe endangered the health of the community, and issued the (callback) order after reviewing the necessary data, with the advice of and approval of both Acting Chief (Dave) Godek and Police Chief (Paul) Dalen," Creer said.

Pilafas, who worked for the department for 19 years, declined to comment on his emails.

Leahy has not returned a message for comment.

On Tuesday, the village put both Leahy and administrative Lt. Jim Weil on paid administrative leave. No reason has been given to the public.

Under the new policy, paid-on-call members can only return when requested by the highest-ranking on-duty member and paged out by DuPage County dispatchers using the callback tone.

On-duty personnel can only request a callback for major incidents such as structure fires or Route 83 crashes when they expect to be committed to the call for 15 or more minutes and when they determine more manpower is needed.

Last week, officials revealed to older employees that the Village Board would consider a mandatory retirement age of 65 for the fire and police departments. The board is set to take up the issue Monday.

Leahy, who started with the fire department in the early 1970s, is believed to be over 65.