We found that in a lot of the calls that the fire department was responding to, they were called out by Karl [Harris], not by the City of Woodward.

Ron has been with Perry for several years and we are confidant that he will do a good job. Charlie has done a good job for us already and will make a good assistant chief.

This has just been going on for too long. The council came up with those stipulations to deal with the situation that we are in. We are less than seven months into the fiscal year and the fire department is already over budget. We can't have that.

We just came to the conclusion that enough was enough. Something needed to be done, so we did it.

We are going to start taking applications for firefighters, but we haven't set an official date that the department will reopen. It depends on how many people are interested in applying.