Former Fire Chief Joshua Williams has filed suit against the Aurora Fire District and Board President Bobby Meyer, alleging the district breached his employment contract and retaliated against him after he complained about board members interfering with fire district operations.

Chief Williams served as Aurora’s fire chief from December 2018 until April 2026. The district provides fire protection in portions of Clackamas and Marion counties and is governed by an elected board of directors.

According to the complaint, Chief Williams and the district entered into a five-year employment agreement in December 2022 that ran through June 30, 2028. The agreement designated Chief Williams as the district’s chief administrative officer and chief executive officer, with responsibility for its day-to-day operations.

The contract anticipated problems with board member interfering with departmental operations, and expressly separated the board’s policymaking role from Chief Williams’ administrative responsibilities. It stated:

• Members of the Board shall not interfere with the day-to-day administration of District operations, which is the responsibility of the Fire Chief.

The agreement also prohibited individual board members from directing district personnel or acting on behalf of the board without authorization. Only the board acting as a unified body could direct Chief Williams on operational, administrative, or personnel matters.

Chief Williams alleges those restrictions were added because individual board members had previously interfered with his administration of the district. The employment agreement also provided that if Chief Williams were to be terminated without cause, the district would be required to pay him his salary plus continue his insurance and retirement benefits for 12 months.

According to the complaint, the problems resurfaced during the spring of 2025. Quoting from the complaint:

• In April, May, and June of 2025, there were several incidents where individual Board Members interfered with the day-to-day administration of District operations and began directing employees on their own personal behalf rather than acting as a unified entity.
• As one example, Director Craig DeRoy contracted an outside company, HR Answers to conduct a salary survey. Plaintiff learned Director DeRoy had personally obligated the District when bills arrived at the fire station.
• As another example, on June 23, 2025, Plaintiff learned that Defendant Bobby Meyer had, since February 2025, been directly instructing Plaintiff’s administrative assistant to blind copy Meyer on all of her emails, clearly circumventing Plaintiff’s authority, inserting himself into the District’s day-to-day administration, and directly communicating instructions to a District employee. These actions are specifically prohibited by Plaintiff’s contract.
• On July 2, 2025, Plaintiff met with Defendant Bobby Meyer, another Director Deb Garner, and the Assistant Fire Chief. During the meeting, Plaintiff told Bobby Meyer (1) that Plaintiff was tired of the Board violating his contract—the reason they had negotiated the restrictions on the Board’s action was to avoid these exact chain of command issues, (2) that if the Board wanted to keep violating his contract, they should let him go without cause and pay the required severance, and (3) that Plaintiff was going to go talk to an attorney to figure out what his rights were.
• After Plaintiff related that message, Defendant Bobby Meyer said he was going to go talk to the attorneys and promptly ended the meeting with a threat: “I have a file on you too.”
• The next scheduled Board Meeting was convened soon thereafter in September 2025, for the purpose of giving Plaintiff a negative performance review so that Defendant Meyer could make good on his threat.
• However, this was another violation of Plaintiff’s contract, “the Board of Directors shall conduct a performance review …annually by December beginning in 2022… This review will be held in executive session at the December Board meetings.” Section IV Evaluation, subsection 8. In other words, the Board agreed to specific limitations on how it would evaluate Plaintiff’s performance and deliberately decided to disregard them.
• The same day as that Board meeting, on September 9, 2025, Plaintiff gave Bobby Meyer a letter from Plaintiff’s attorney saying the following:
  • It is my understanding that the Board intends to hold a performance review of Mr. Williams on September 9, 2025. Mr. Williams’ employment is governed by contract. The contract specifically states how Mr. Williams’ performance may be evaluated and on what criteria his performance may be evaluated.
  • Those terms were specifically negotiated between the Board and Mr. Williams…Were the Board to, say for example, try to terminate Mr. Williams employment “for cause” to avoid paying Mr. Williams the severance payments he negotiated, Mr. Williams would assert legal claims against the Board. Aside from the obvious breach of contract claim which this would create…”
  • One further hypothetical, now that the Board is on notice that it needs to follow the employment contract, if the Board were to invent or manufacture a “for cause” reason, that would be a further violation of the implied covenant of good faith which is in every Oregon contract…
  • My suggestion to the Board is as follows: if you want to end Mr. Williams employment, use the without cause provision of his contract. Mr. Williams employment is governed by one of the more pro-employee contracts that has come across my desk. If the Board breaks the contract, it is inviting litigation.
  • Mr. Williams is proud of his service to the Fire District and has had a good relationship with many of the Board’s members. It is not his desire or his wish that we need to spend the next couple of years arguing about this. So he has assured me that if the Board follows its contract with him, he will not pursue litigation.
  • The Board may wish for new direction with leadership- and that is fine—that is the Board’s decision. However, I want to strongly urge the Board and its individual members to honor the commitment to Mr. Williams.

The board subsequently placed Chief Williams on paid administrative leave and retained private investigator Jim Ferraris, whom the complaint describes as a former colleague of Chief Williams. Chief Williams remained on leave for approximately seven months while the investigation was conducted.

The investigator issued a report containing numerous findings against Chief Williams, and the board terminated him on April 3, 2026. The district characterized the termination as being for cause and did not pay the severance provided for a without-cause termination.

The agreement defined good cause to include a willful and continuous failure to comply with district policies, fraud, dishonesty, misappropriation, intentional deception, certain criminal conduct, or a failure to perform the duties of fire chief faithfully and diligently. It also required a good-cause determination to be based on direct and personal experience by one or more board members and supported by credible evidence.

Chief Williams alleges the district decided to terminate him and then used the investigation to characterize the decision as a for-cause termination. The complaint notes that one of the stated grounds involved financial management, even though the district rated his financial management as acceptable in a December 2025 performance review conducted while he was on leave.

The suit also alleges the district underpaid Chief Williams for 110 hours of accrued vacation. He claims the district failed to include vacation earned while he was on paid administrative leave.

Chief Williams’ complaint asserts claims against the district for breach of contract, failure to pay wages upon termination, wrongful termination, and public-employer whistleblower retaliation. He alleges his complaints about individual board members directing employees outside the chain of command constituted reports of abuse of authority and mismanagement protected by Oregon law.

Meyer is named individually in a claim alleging he aided and abetted the district’s unlawful employment practices.

Chief Williams is seeking $271,000 in contract damages, $406,000 in back pay, $100,000 in noneconomic damages, and an $18,276 statutory wage penalty. He is also seeking reinstatement or, alternatively, $581,000 in front pay, along with attorney fees, costs, and interest.