Today in Ohio
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HAMBDEN TOWNSHIP, Ohio — The most astonishing number in the Hambden Township fire department scandal might not be the $1.6 million theft.
It might be the three years.
That was the reaction on Today in Ohio as the hosts tried to understand how one person could drain nearly all the money from a small volunteer fire department without the people responsible for overseeing the organization noticing.
“It just boggles my mind,” Chris Quinn said.
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Laura Johnston explained that the former assistant fire chief and treasurer of the Hambden Volunteer Fire Department Inc. has been indicted on five felonies and pleaded not guilty. Prosecutors believe the thefts occurred between January 2023 and May 2026, she said, with much of the money used to cover gambling losses at Jack Casino.
What stunned the hosts was the apparent simplicity of the scheme.
“This isn’t even stealth,” Johnston said. “There’s no laundering here. In what’s described, it was just transfers and checks that he wrote himself.”
The department’s unusual structure helps explain how the situation could develop, Johnston said, but in the hosts’ view does not excuse the absence of oversight.
The fire department is a nonprofit organization rather than a part of township government. The township pays the volunteer organization to provide fire service. The accused man was the department treasurer.
That apparently put enormous control over the finances in one person’s hands.
Quinn immediately returned to a basic question: Even if the treasurer handled the books, why wasn’t anyone else checking the bank accounts?
“There are bank statements that show the amount of money you have in your accounts,” Quinn said. “And the fire chief never looked at it? The head of the board that oversees the fire department never looked at it? What? Where is their fiduciary responsibility?”
That, to Quinn, was the most elementary failure.
“You never let one person have control of the books without oversight,” he said.
Johnston said prosecutors allege that when the treasurer supplied financial information from QuickBooks, he omitted transfers and checks payable to himself. Her best explanation for how that could go undetected was the small scale of the operation.
“This is a small volunteer department,” Johnston said. “It’s a nonprofit.”
“I think it’s just nobody else was paying attention,” Johnston said, “and things functioned, and they got paid from the township, and they kept going.”
Making the losses even more consequential, Johnston said, about $800,000 of the missing money came from a $2 million state grant intended to help construct a new fire station.
“So I don’t even know if they can build the whole thing,” Johnston said. “If they’re out that much money.”
That state money raised yet another oversight question for Quinn.
“Look, where was the state auditor?” he asked. “If it involves state money, the state auditor can be looking, too.”
His point was not that one particular person or agency alone should have stopped the thieving. It was that so many people with oversight failed to catch it.
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