By Kevin Boneske
Staff Writer
SUAMICO – Business owner Dennis Korpan was unsuccessful Nov. 15 in getting the Village Board to rescind a $50 fee for the Brown County Sheriff’s Office responding to a second false alarm within two years at his bed and breakfast.
Korpan, owner of Posey Patch Retreat and Studio at 2840 School Lane, appeared before the board with his attorney, Deron Andre, to contest the charge.
Village Administrator Alex Kaker said the false alarms at Korpan’s business Aug. 30, 2020, and July 25, 2021, were the result of burnt food setting off the fire alarm.
Kaker said there is no charge in the village code for the first false alarm, but multiple false alarms within a continuous two-year period are charged a fee, with the second and third false alarms charged $50, and any subsequent false alarms within that time charged $100.
“The purpose of the code is to, in part, discourage the incidence of preventable or avoidable false alarms,” he said. “In practice, we have been categorizing false alarms to be false alarms only when a police officer arrives on scene, and it is determined to be a false alarm.”Â
Kaker said Suamico code defines a false alarm as the “activation of an alarm through negligence of the owner or lessee of an alarm system or of his or her employees or agents.”
“Negligence, as defined by the Webster dictionary, is failure to exercise the care that a reasonably prudent person would exercise in like circumstances,” he said. “For these reasons, staff have been billing businesses for a false alarm, if an officer arrives on scene due to an alarm being triggered by things like burnt toast or bacon.”
Andre said the definition of a false alarm wouldn’t apply if it was a tenant of Korpan’s who burnt toast and set off the fire alarm.
“I don’t know what the village’s position would be – let’s say there’s an apartment building and someone burns toast and the alarm goes off,” Andre said. “I don’t know if they get fined for that, because under the law a tenant is technically not his agent.”
Andre said he wanted to know how the board interprets the code for false alarms, and he asked the fee charged to Korpan be rescinded after the fire alarms were set off twice, once for burnt bacon and the other for burnt toast.
“If there’s any negligence, it would have been on the tenant and not on Mr. Korpan,” he said. “The alarm system worked perfectly well. In fact, it did what exactly it was supposed to do, which is have an alert if it was smoke or fire.”
To avoid having the sheriff’s office respond to an alarm when there would be no fire, Trustee Dan Roddan suggested Korpan be notified by an alarm company to handle the alarm going off so an officer wouldn’t be dispatched.
Korpan said he checked into that and was told it couldn’t be done with a commercial property because of liability reasons.
Village President Sky Van Rossum said other Suamico businesses with false alarms, such as for improper use of a steam shower or burnt toast, would pay the fee, which is intended to prevent the Suamico Fire Department from having to respond to a false alarm.
Without a fee in place, Fire Chief Joel Bertler said businesses could potentially leave alarms unserviced.
Bertler said a business could set up a “calling tree” with an alarm company to be notified in the event of a false alarm.
“Ultimately, at the end, if the alarm company does not get a hold of someone on the calling tree… Brown County dispatch is who they call,” he said. “It doesn’t matter whether it’s commercial or not, from my understanding, because we have other businesses that have (false) alarms all the time that we never get called for.”
Bertler said it costs, on average, around $850 for the fire department to respond to a false alarm.
Board members agreed not to rescind the $50 fee charged to Korpan.
“Ultimately, in my opinion, responsibility lies with the owner of the property to come up with some sort of (process) that this doesn’t happen, or that he pays the fines,” Roddan said. “Every other business in our community has paid the fines when they’ve been levied.”