The stand-off between Muncy Township’s government and the township’s volunteer fire company was, in a word, disappointing.

While we are happy that the matter seems to have been resolved before it had to go before a judge, we question why the delays happened in the first place.

We have to question if attempts to apply precision around the semantics of a lease is a practical or reasonable approach when the landlord is the municipality and the tenants are a volunteer fire company with a long history of selfless service to that township’s residents, constituents and taxpayers.

On one side, the landlord is a community — not that community’s government — and in this case public comment at meetings indicates support for working with the fire company.

On the other side, the tenants are not a self-interested party — a household or family that needs to secure living arrangements or a business that factors property expenses into what it charges consumers for goods or services.

It instead is a volunteer fire company.

Every expense it incurs — and the trajectory of society and government has swollen those expenses for training, for equipment and for so many aspects of operations — will be borne by the community. By fundraising and possibly by cuts on other expenses. And if the community wishes to remain safe, it will have to help incur those expenses.

It should not have reached a point where the fire company nearly relocated its operations to a neighboring township’s fire hall, along with the Muncy Area Fire Company.

During that looming threat, residents of Muncy Township were worried about increases in response times — as they should have been. We understand residents of surrounding communities may have been concerned about whether the Muncy Area Fire Hall, presumably designed and built for one fire company, not two, will fully function as well as when Muncy Township had its own functioning fire hall.

While these concerns were valid too, we are confident that our region’s firefighters would have worked together — and worked hard — to ensure the public safety of our communities.

We wish we could be as confident that the ruling majority on the Muncy Township Board of Supervisors were as interested in public safety as they had been in the semantics of a lease.