Catching up: DC's fire chief & the council member. Two hearings within a week.

Watch last Wednesday’s hearing on overtime spending (Chief Rubin’s testimony begins at 20:30)

Watch the March 12 performance oversight hearing (Chief Rubin’s testimony begins at 2:17:25 )

Previous coverage of the council chairman & the fire chief

For just short of a year we have been closely watching the very rocky relationship between DC Fire & EMS Chief Dennis Rubin and City Council member Phil Mendelson. Last April 1, the two went at it over an unusual deal that sent a fire engine and ambulance to a resort town in the Dominican Republic. Since then there have been many other testy exchanges between the chief and the chairman of the  Committee on Public Safety and the Judiciary.

For those who have been drawn to this battle, we now have new videos for you covering two hearings in just five days. The first one we previously covered. It was a regular oversight hearing on Friday, March 12. That entire hearing is now online (see the link above).

Much of the testimony on that day covered the recent death of two-year-old Stephanie Stephens. Maybe it was out of respect for the loss of the little girl, but there was little in the way of confrontation between the two men.

That would change on the following Wednesday. The March 17 yearing specifically covered the department’s growing overtime expenditures. It is an area where Rubin and Mendelson have long disagreed.

A lot of the heat from this hearing seemed to center on Mendelson’s questions about the money spent to upstaff the department during the back-to-back blizzards. You will see in the video it is pretty clear the two men did not come to any agreement on the issue.