For the past 12-years Baltimore’s Board of Fire Commissioners were supposed to be working for free. They haven’t been. Error just caught.

This faded picture from The Baltimore Sun on May 3, 1972 documents the first meeting of the Baltimore City Board of Fire Commissioners I ever attended. I skipped classes in an effort to get a better understanding how the fire department worked. Those were the days when the board had a good deal of power over the fire chief and his budget.

You may recall two weeks ago I ran a 1998 Baltimore City Paper article that gave a brief history of the department and concentrated on the administration of Mayor Kurt Schmoke. The article talked about Mayor Schmoke changing the make up and the role of the board:

“I made clear to them that they were an advisory board,” Schmoke says, “not a policy board.”

It turns out that Mayor Schmoke did more than change the role of the board, he took away their pay in 1996. The problem is nobody realized that fact until now. It was discovered when the current mayor expanded the number of members on the board and someone tried to put the new members on the payroll.

The Sun’s Annie Linskey, as usual, has the story. Here’s an excerpt:

A provision authorizing pay for the commissioners was removed from the city’s charter when it was revised under Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke’s administration more than a decade ago. But, apparently, neither the commissioners nor the city department that writes the checks realized it.

The board members have continued to receive nominal pay from the city – roughly $3,600 a year for each member and $4,200 for the president. The Finance Department did not answer questions last week about how much the city has paid out in error over the years, but at current rates, the 12 years of checks would amount to about $138,000.