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| FIREFIGHTER STAFFING, FUNDING...SAFETY AND SURVIVAL |
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The Financial Crisis of 2008-20??
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July 2010 Report
Click here to download the July 2010 pdf file
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"STAFFING & RESOURCES: DOING AN ALREADY DIFFICULT JOB WITHOUT THEM?"
Cuts in the Fire Service
Reductions in Resources
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What’s Been Happening?
Since the January Report, there was a period of time, as expected, when the budget cutting of fire departments almost paused from its peak intensity in the last months of 2009, until the next approaching wave this coming July 1st. Even TSL reader email contributions all but stopped. (Do you recall sending any updates, lately?) Taking advantage of the lull between the storms, we embarked on two projects.
1 – From the many comments that the budgetary crisis did not begin with the recent economic crash, but in fact, has been draining some fire departments since 2000, we researched the American Fire Services archives and brought out the cuts, closures, and staff reductions for the last ten years. Noted also is the Staffing page has reported only on the departments for which you submitted information. Again, we scoured the archives to include those departments that we had not heard about. The bad news? – It was a huge task. The good news? – We finished three months early. The results? – Considerably more career fire departments are in trouble than initially reported.
2 – Analyze and summarize what has happened due to budget cuts in the past year. It is evident that fire departments are being targeted nationwide. The primary objectives are contracts, salaries, and benefit packages. The secondary losses, coming directly from reduced staffing, are losses of stations and companies. Small and mid-size city fire departments are being hit the hardest. Massachusetts and Michigan lead the losses. A more detailed comparison is being researched. In reviewing hundreds of fire department reduction articles, it is clear that municipal officials, both elected and appointed, are resolved and determined to redefine public funded fire suppression. For the most part, resistance by the fire service community has been ineffective. We offer a few of the most common Do’s and Don’ts.
Document your services to the community.
Document your successful operations and programs.
Document your prevention and education activities.
Document your community presence at every opportunity.
Document the assets, the jobs, and the tax base, that you are preserving.
Talk about company availability.
Treat the public with professionalism, kindness, and courtesy. When they need you, they are not usually having a good day. Remember, you may have been to dozens of fires, hundreds of wrecks, and thousands of sick calls, but must people are experiencing their first and only one, and it is tragic for them.
Remember that your mostly secure job has been funded by the taxes of others who may have recently lost their own jobs.
Overemphasize response time.
They are not listening. Most people long to live and vacation in settings where response times do not matter as much.
Talk about reaching medical calls in three minutes every time.
They know about having to wait for hours in hospital emergency rooms, doctors offices, and clinics.
Brownout stations or companies.
If you don’t need them 24/7/365 – you don’t need them.
Implement rotational brownouts.
Don’t tell them that a company isn’t needed, but that by rotating closures, you can’t prioritize which ones you don’t need. You are actually telling them that you don’t need any from the rotation schedule. Russian roulette has 5 blanks and one bullet – you see the bullet, they see the blanks.
Abuse sick time.
The media is watching.
Do anything that you would not do in front of your parents.
Acts of stupidity, recklessness, and criminal arrests make great headlines.
Inflate your run statistics.
Non duty responses will be scrutinized.
Play the “Buildings will burn and People will die” game.
All fires left alone will go out by themselves eventually and the sick will either get better or worse. You know it – they know it. Talk about what you do for them – not what will happen to them.
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| Public Safety By Appointment |
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Late last year, as the economic fantasy bubble burst, it became apparent that government revenues and the municipal budgeting process would be poorly suited for surviving the impending recession. Municipalities would be cutting services. Firefighter Close Calls decided to document this impact on municipal fire protection as it became evident that the magnitude of the cuts would rival the cuts of earlier generations and foreshadow a revolutionary change in public perception of how the fire service does business.
In the ensuing months, the municipal fire service has seen sizable decreases that can be generally categorized into three distinct areas. Changes have been made in compensation and benefit packages, reductions in staffing have been implemented, and stations and fire fighting units have been discontinued.
Changes in compensation packages have affected not only the fire service but all public sector employees and average working tax payers as well. Significantly, a large percentage of the fire service has secured their compensation and benefits by contractual agreements. In many cases, municipalities did not foresee the reduction of income and were trapped by long term contracts. Municipalities have frequently chosen to involve union labor to offer changes in benefits by forgoing or deferring general wage increases, expanding health insurance co-payments, rescinding promotional opportunities and eliminating overtime. Often these changes have been accepted as bitter-sweet – bitter as concessions of hard won benefits, and sweet for the saving of younger members livelihoods.
Deeper cuts took the form of employee layoffs. Staffing reductions have appeared in several ways. Municipalities froze hiring and overtime, effectively limiting shift staffing to the number of employees that showed up to work each shift. Public perceptions of sick leave abuse lead to official and media audits of work attendance. Employee layoffs have resulted in unit staffing reductions. Larger fire departments have managed to compensate by altering dispatch policies to send more units. Smaller departments that do not have broader resources or automatic aid agreements are simply deploying fewer staff. “Do more with less” and “Do the best you can with what you have” attitudes have capitalized on the fire service’s traditional “Can Do” culture.
The third method of cutting services has been to close units and stations. A common approach has been “brownouts.” These are characterized as temporary eliminations of services to specific neighborhoods or areas, while simultaneously leaving others intact. Some municipalities, in a perception of fairness, have eliminated and restored services from one neighborhood to another, on a rotational basis. Permanent reductions of services have occurred where units and stations have been closed outright. Yet, the job is still getting done.
Which fire departments are getting cut most severely and which ones are remaining intact? Significantly, and perhaps obviously, these issues are affecting the career fire service. Very little in the way of reductions and cuts have been reported from the volunteer fire service. It is the cost of compensation that is driving reductions. In the time immediately following the September 11 murders, the fire service enjoyed a period of approval, adulation and support. The perception of heroes among working people was strong. As the economic recession has swelled the unemployment rate above 10%, public perception has altered. The apparent security and benefits of fire service positions are no longer understood. The frequently used justification that “people will die”, is no longer threatening. Municipal leaders have even justified publishing brownout schedules in the belief that advance publicity will encourage people to be more careful.
“Response times will increase.” This statement no longer impresses the average citizen. While the survivability of a person in cardiac arrest is directly documented to the time that CPR is initiated, the time for a fire to double in size has been reported variously from 10 seconds to 10 minutes. To the individual who calls 911, response time is always from too long to forever, regardless of how long it actually is. Station and unit closures increasing response times are less effective arguments when the public remembers units being closed to increase staffing on others, without protest from the fire service.
Police agencies can document crime rates increasing when fewer officers are deployed. Sanitation services can document increased vermin populations when garbage is allowed to accumulate. School teachers can document declines in student grades when classroom sizes increase, but there is no correlation between the number of fires and how many stations are open. People will march and demonstrate when a fire house closes but seldom will they notice when a fire prevention office is eliminated. The work of the fire service has changed. There are fewer fires even as the population has exploded. Hazardous conditions and medical emergencies have grown, but the fire service still talks about fires. The fire service seldom demonstrates its abilities in front of huge crowds at big fires as often as it shows them to a few people at a time at motor vehicle crashes and medical emergencies.
Stand alone; isolated career municipalities have taken the greatest hits. City managers have made reductions based on perceptions of priorities and concepts of fairness to citizens and employees. Accusations of politics, retribution, and malice have been made. Departments lacking adequate staffing to begin with, are most easily cut, as the inadequacy is already present and only becomes more acute. Largely untouched are departments that serve regions or that participate in extensive automatic aid. Their efficiencies of scale have already been proven. In Fire & EMS departments, reductions are being made primarily on the fire side. EMS in general is not being cut. Some departments are shifting suppression personnel to EMS duties.
Physical resources are essentially unchanged. New stations continue to be constructed and major apparatus are still being purchased. In fact, some municipalities are stimulating their local economies by advancing their capital construction and station renovation projects. As the economy continues towards the bursting of the next bubble, the fire service needs to review the methods by which it expresses the relationship between the value of its services and the preservation of the community’s vital interests. It must extensively document the economic impact of its activities against the necessary expenses to achieve community goals. Citizen consumers must be continually educated of the services and benefits provided by the fire service for their hard earned taxed income. |
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| Priorities ??? |
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The Definition
Brownout = Rotating shift by shift closures
The Principle
The IAFF has taken the position that it's best to keep at least four firefighters on each apparatus and, if reductions are absolutely necessary, it's better to idle an apparatus or even temporarily close the station. 02/04/2010 Firehouse.com
The Playbook
Another I-Team discovers firefighters make overtime: Contract negotiating time when money is very tight and suddenly everyone realizes the fire department is way over its overtime budget. This has happened in jurisdiction after jurisdiction across the country since the economy went south. We have run a bunch of stories that fit the pattern. The script goes like this. Political leaders say the OT is busting their budgets and often someone leaks the details to a newspaper or TV station. The news media runs the story showing how firefighters are all the top money makers in town. Someone claims there is something fishy going on. The IAFF points out if you hire firefighters and fill all the vacant positions you can then spend less on overtime. Then there is usually the call to lower minimum staffing requirements. Some of that is now going on in a town near you…
Thanks to Dave Statter, Statter911.com |
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| Left Coast to Right Coast ! ! ! |
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What is happening?
As a result of the budgetary crisis that is following the financial Crash of 2008, municipalities are reducing expenditures. Budget administrators are deciding how much and what kind of fire protection their municipalities can financially afford. Many are determining that they cannot afford what they presently have.
WE, at FireFighterCloseCalls.com know that a PROPERLY FUNDED AND STAFFED FIRE DEPARTMENT is like an INSURANCE POLICY....YOU ONLY WORRY ABOUT IT WHEN YOU NEED IT....and to find out you are "not covered" can be devastating.....
While it is EASY for elected officials, Mayors and City Manager-Types to cut fire service funding, so often their short sighted-ness leads to disaster...for the taxpayers AND for the FIREFIGHTERS expected to operate "as usual" ....but WITHOUT the required resources. IT IS PREDICATBLE that a fire department with less funding, staffing and related resources WILL NOT arrive quicker, the fire WILL spread faster and FIREFIGHTERS abilities to effectively slow or stop the fire...and perform the needed SEARCHES and RESCUES will be measurably and negatively IMPACTED. After all, a TAXPAYER may only need THEIR FD ONCE....just like filing an INSURANCE CLAIM. So what will happen when they dial 9-1-1? Just like filing that severely cut insurance claim, they will sadly find out that they DO NOT have the coverage that they now IMMEDIATELY NEED
If it is PREDICTABLE....It is PREVENTABLE.
READERS: Please also take time to GOOGLE the specific FD listed so you can personally contact-or track-what the latest is in relation to the specific FD's cuts and reductions.
What are we doing?
FFCC, from your input, is recording the staffing and resource reductions caused by these monetary decisions
Why?
To share news of how the financial decisions are affecting the fire service nation wide. Impacts include contractual, operational, staffing, deployment, and compensation issues.
FFCC is documenting the reductions so that "before and after" comparisons can be made. Seldom has any city ever analyzed the consequences of downsizing long term in an objective manner. Staffing studies show up every ten years or so, but we never see a post downsizing study comparison. Sometimes we might see a response time review but never any life or property loss analysis. Companies get closed, staffing gets cut, and the city just accepts a different (lower) level of service. Public memory is much too short. Why can we talk about the potential effects of cuts before, but never document them after?
The "crisis" actually started in FY 07/08. The cuts that we are seeing now are adjustments for FY 08/09, and there are hundreds of them. The real cuts will come during FY 09/10 as cities see four quarters of diminished incomes.
What can we do to avoid the cuts?
Document, document, document. Record the statistics for at least the last 12 months prior to any cuts so that comparisons can be made of the effects next year and later. Vital statistics such as response times, losses, ISO ratings, injuries, retirement rates. You can't prove what the effect of any cut was unless you define what the service level was before. You will not be able to ever restore what was cut without proving the consequences of the cut.
Why tell the world on Firefighter Close Calls?
What happens to one department, can and will happen to other departments, sooner or later. By submitting your department’s cuts, we can watch, record and learn, so that we can educate the budgetary people sooner, with documented facts. Tell us what is happening in your area and update any changes. Staffing@firefighterclosecalls.com. |
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