Debra Desrosiers, president of the Sutter Yuba Taxpayers Association.

When two of Sutter County’s three fire stations started taking turns going dark last month, a lot of us got the news the modern way: Facebook. Not from the county. Not from a supervisor. From the firefighter’s union, Local 5032, posting which station was open and which one wasn’t.

Supervisors I talked to didn’t even have the same story about when they found out. One heard it at a meeting. One heard the next morning. One heard it from a friend. That’s not a communications strategy. That’s a group text that never got sent.

Which raises a reasonable question for a county that employs a fire chief: Where is he?

 Kyle Long started April 13. The Board of Supervisors introduced him the next day. The official “please welcome our new chief” announcement showed up two weeks later. Then, for months, not much. When engines started going offline, residents were refreshing a union page like it was the weather.

Long spent two decades in Vallejo and left as fire chief. In June 2022, Capt. Melisse Leitzke was working a salvage-yard fire when a reporter drifted too close and caught water from a hose. The reporter complained. A Skelly officer — the person whose job is to decide whether the proposed punishment makes sense — found no evidence she sprayed him on purpose and said demotion was overkill. Long demoted her anyway. An arbitrator later knocked it down to a written warning and put her back at captain.

Leitzke sued Vallejo in 2023 for gender discrimination, harassment and retaliation. She said the hose wasn’t the story. The story was what happened after she complained. In April 2024, with that lawsuit still hanging over the department, Long went on leave from Vallejo with no public explanation. He signed a 12-page separation agreement worth $63k, did a short tour at Cal OES, and Sutter County hired him.

On July 31, a Solano County jury found Vallejo liable for retaliating against her. A few days later the city wrote a check for $5 million. That was Vallejo’s bill, not ours. We just hired the chief who made the call that helped produce it.

Maybe the hiring packet in April didn’t include a Solano County courthouse preview. Fine. It is September now. The verdict is public. The settlement is public. The brownouts are public. The only thing still fuzzy is why the person paid to lead Sutter Fire is not the person residents hear from when a station goes dark.

Staffing was a mess before Long got here — vacancies, people out on leave, a department that has been warning about this for years.

That is on the Board as much as anyone. What isn’t the chief is standing in front of the community when response times get longer. The Board was pleased to welcome him in April. The welcome gift from Vallejo arrived in August. Somebody on that dais should ask what else was in the gift box.

— Debra Desrosiers is president of the Sutter Yuba Taxpayers Association. For more than 25 years, she has monitored local government budgets, tax proposals and public spending. She holds a degree in economics with a minor in business. Desrosiers advocates for transparency, limited government and cost-effective use of taxpayer dollars.