Why Should Delaware Care?
Substantial funding from the state and county governments is directed to volunteer companies across the state every year. Recent findings of tens of thousands of dollars of in misused funds and a lack of formal bookkeeping by the Marydel Volunteer Fire Company are raising questions about government oversight of fire companies’ finances.
A state audit investigating fraud within the volunteer fire company of a small, unincorporated town along the Delaware-Maryland border revealed tens of thousands of dollars of unaccounted spending. It also raised concerns among elected officials about lacking oversight for fire companies across the state.
In a report detailing the investigation, which looked into the Marydel Volunteer Fire Company’s spending between fiscal years 2021 and 2023, State Auditor Lydia York recommended a number of new regulatory and oversight measures be implemented by both the Marydel VFC and the State Fire Commission, which supervises the state’s roughly 60 volunteer fire companies.
In her report, York outlined the lack of clear oversight for volunteer companies across Delaware, a gap that leaves the more than $60 million they receive annually from the state largely unchecked, she said.
“Volunteer fire service is noble, and it has a rich cultural history,” York told Spotlight Delaware. “But the number of dollars that are involved now have gotten to the point where we really need to ask more questions about what they’re doing.”
York’s audit, released on Tuesday, is the second time the company has been investigated in the past 12 years.
A 2014 audit found a similar dearth of spending documentation, including $13,000 paid from the company account to the fire chief’s personal catering business.
And while members of the Marydel fire company are pointing fingers at one another in the wake of the most recent audit’s findings, state leaders say the report raises questions about how Delaware funds its fire companies, and the way oversight functions at both the county and state level.
All fire companies in the state are volunteer-run except for the Wilmington Fire Department, which has paid staff. The volunteer companies are funded through a mix of state grant-in-aid money and some other state funding sources, like a tax from the Department of Insurance, and county funding.
The state invested roughly $67 million, or an average of $1 million per company, into the volunteer fire companies last year, York said.
A closer look at the audit
The unique geography of Marydel makes its fire company funding more complicated. Still, the results of the audit were clear: “Bad behavior” and a lack of internal controls within the fire company ranks, York said.
The Marydel Fire Company is named for the Kent County town it serves, which straddles the Delaware-Maryland border. The Maryland side is an incorporated town of about 170 residents, while Delaware’s portion is unincorporated and home to roughly 1,350 residents.
The fire company receives funding each year from the county and state in both Maryland and Delaware.
The recent audit looked only at the funding from the Delaware side. Nonetheless, York said her office found that Maryland has a more stringent process for ensuring funding oversight on the dollars it provides to fire companies.
The audit substantiated allegations of financial misconduct by the fire company’s president, Randy Barr, and treasurer, Les States, between the 2021-2023 fiscal years.
Barr and States are no longer in leadership roles at the fire company, according to other members of the organization and the auditor’s office. Buffy Madden, who was found to have misused tens of thousands of dollars of the fire company’s money in the 2014 audit, is now in charge of the organization again, they said.
The investigation determined that Barr spent nearly $29,000 on the fire company credit card at a warehouse retail store, $13,000 on food service distributors and $10,800 on hotels between July 2020 and June 2023.
The audit also found that Barr and States reported raising hundreds of thousands dollars from company fundraisers, like fees from renting out the fire hall. But there was no evidence of them depositing those funds into company accounts, or doing any organized bookkeeping of finances.
The Marydel fire company received about $750,000 in state funding from Delaware in 2022 and 2023, in addition to funding from Kent County, the state of Maryland and Caroline County, Md.
The company reported surpluses of nearly $78,000 in 2022 and nearly $200,000 in 2023, according to its nonprofit tax forms submitted for those years.
The lack of formal budgeting and bookkeeping revealed in the audit, York said, is a key point she implores the fire company to change in its policies moving forward.
“We want people to get better at their accounting systems,” she said. “We would suggest, quite frankly, a paper system can get you there.”
Firemen, community respond
While the audit report outlined a number of recommendations for the fire department to implement, it remains unclear how fire company leadership plans to proceed, as they question the validity of the findings and blame one another for the situation.
Robert Helmer and Rob Barnes told Spotlight Delaware they used to be a part of the company’s leadership, but were ousted due to disputes with other members. They also said they were the whistleblowers to the state auditor in late 2024 about the recent financial mismanagement.
Barnes said the company should have implemented better safeguards after the 2014 audit to prevent certain people from getting too much power, or abusing company funds, but he believes that the company not taking the previous audit seriously led to the current situation.
“Everything [the state] told them to do in that audit, they didn’t do,” Barnes said. “Now you’ve got this mess.”
Barr, the president who was found to have misused company funds in the recent audit, wrote in a message to Spotlight Delaware that he “has not stolen anything from the department,” and would attribute the “allegations” to other members of the fire company trying to retaliate against him.
Barr also said he is in the process of filing a lawsuit against the fire company.
Madden, the current fire chief — who also is the chief accused in the 2014 audit — declined to comment on the investigation and current state of the fire company.
A handful of community members described to Spotlight Delaware their experiences with the fire company, both positive and negative.
State Sen. Dave Lawson (R-Marydel) had a different assessment of the situation.
Lawson said he has not had a chance to fully read the recently released audit, but he considers the 2014 audit to have been simply a reflection of internal politics within the fire company – its findings were “much ado about nothing,” he said.
“The volunteer fire companies are the backbone of the state when it comes to community involvement, community effort, and saving the community,” he added.
State leaders look ahead
As the volunteer fire company system currently exists, there is limited oversight at the county and state levels. But some elected officials say they want that to change.
A 2016 legislative task force looked at the financial management procedures of volunteer fire companies, in response to findings that some had embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars in recent years.
As a result of the task force, the General Assembly passed legislation in 2017 empowering the State Fire Commission to oversee fire companies’ required audits more directly. If companies did not complete their audit requirements, the state treasurer could withhold grant-in-aid funding from the company, the law says.
However, York said, the state treasurer has not taken advantage of that mechanism, because the legislation has “very few absolutes,” and the state has been hesitant to encroach on the independence of fire companies.
Now, though, she said there is a sense the Marydel controversy has brought a need for more oversight to the attention of the fire commission and state lawmakers.
Lawson said he believes the investigative arm of the State Fire Commission, which has only been around a couple of years, is still figuring out its responsibilities and jurisdiction in “unchartered territories,” so it will take some time for the department to work in full force.
Bob Scott, vice president of the Kent County Levy Court and a longtime volunteer firefighter in Houston, said the county government has also been reconsidering how it oversees the money it provides to fire companies.
As the current system functions, Scott said, the Levy Court bases its funding decisions on the financial report the fire companies send to the state fire commission.
“Naturally,” Scott added, “we don’t want to give taxpayers’ money to departments that aren’t able to be accountable for their funding.”
Maggie Reynolds is a Report for America corps member and Spotlight Delaware reporter who covers rural communities in Delaware. Your donation to match our Report for America grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://spotlightdelaware.org/support/.
