Unlike other departments such as schools, libraries and parks, the fire and police departments have always been protected against local budget crises in all cities in America. No matter how deep the budget crises of the municipality might go, the firefighters’ pay, ranks or benefits are never touched. For firefighters, there are no reductions in force. However, that is what has been happening in all cities across America. Just like other municipal workers, firefighters are becoming equally vulnerable to budget cuts (Horner & Ivacko, 2016). The fiscal conditions in localities have become brutal and therefore shape this new landscape. In this era, there are severe economic uncertainties, and as a result, high-level municipal officials have portrayed firefighters as people who have taken up more than their fair share of local resources; firehouses and equipment, salaries, and retirement packages provided by the local government ( Dornhelm , 2010 ).
Currently, the cost of paying firefighters is one area that city officials are focusing. For example let us look at San Jose, a city in California. In the past decade, a firefighter’s benefits and wages have risen to 100 percent, yet city revenues have only risen by 20 percent. Today, an average firefighter costs the city at least $180,000 annually (England & Brown, 2014). Also, the employees of San Jose city who are paid the highest was are upper-level fire service members, forgetting we also have city managers. Moreover, firefighters who have been in service for over thirty years can retire with 90 percent of their wages. In response to this, the office of the mayor of San Jose decided to lay off 49 firefighters. The decision was reached by the Local 230.
Delegate your assignment to our experts and they will do the rest.
In other cities, layoffs of firefighters have not yet occurred because unions have come to concessions, despite the fact that unions are tough negotiators. However, this does not mean that unions have merged into city demands. For instance, in Jacksonville, the union of firefighters first rejected a contract which called for a pay cut of 2 percent and that firefighters who were single and with no dependents to contribute to their health insurance. Subsequently, the city proceeded to lay off 15 firefighters (Warner, 2012). The layoff process also involved sending other active firefighters to lower level jobs. Consequently, the firefighters union of Jacksonville capitulated. The 15 firefighters were reinstated, but the city still plans on eliminating other firefighters through attrition. The members of the Jacksonville Association of Firefighters understood the hard economic times and responded positively to the 2 percent pay cut and single members paying 5 percent of their medical insurance.
Firefighters make several sacrifices to save residents of their cities. Moreover, the number of calls that relate to fore and emergency medical services is increasing every day, and firefighters are becoming the forefront of someone’s healthcare. What pisses off Wyse, the chairman of the Jacksonville Association of Firefighters, is that his city sends several million in developing local amenities, such as the river walk that cost $600, 000 and keeping the city’s professional football team happy (Horner & Ivacko, 2016). In his opinion, Wyse thinks that Jacksonville has money for luxuries but squeezes public safety. As a result of this, Wyse labeled the budget crisis of the city as contrived. He believes that there is no recession in demanding for services of firefighters even in the situation where the budget of the city is constrained.
Jacksonville is a consolidated city in America, and therefore it experiences less budget pain as compared to other municipalities that are larger. With Jacksonville cutting costs on the fire and rescue team, one can easily predict what is happening in the rest of America. The number of compromises, service deductions, cuts, and givebacks is alarming. After losing 23 firefighters which accounted for about 25 percent workforce reduction, Lowell, a city in Massachusetts, is currently depending heavily on mutual support from other surrounding towns to provide fire suppression services for them (England & Brown, 2014). Also, firefighters in Muskegon, Michigan, have drafted a contract that will last for three years and involves the use of part-time firefighters. Firefighters in Baltimore were given an option of either taking between 5 to 8 days leave or risk a loss of 100 fire and rescue positions. In Elgin, a suburb of Chicago, firefighters agreed to a contract that stated no raise of salaries and no layoff of positions (Williams Leachman & Johnson, 2011). The contract also changed the minimum staffing level to 34 from 36, thus saving $750,000 for the city every year.
Firefighters in Newark, a city in New Jersey, responded by joining a court challenge with the aim of contesting a budget which called for hundreds of employees of the municipal council being laid off. The city budget included laying off of 24 firefighters. In San Diego, a system called rolling brownout was institutionalized. The system included temporarily closing certain firehouses. The initiative would take at least a tenth of the fire and rescue team off the streets each day, hence saving almost $12 million annually for the city. At the same time, Michael Bloomberg, the City Mayor of New York revealed a plan which would significantly reduce the local workforce by having some fire stations closed in the night (Williams, Leachman &Johnson, 2011). Bloomberg is also using a proposal that was unveiled by the Fire Department of New York and includes charging motorists around $490 each and using the funds to respond to car fires and accidents.
Laying off and cutting salaries of all members of the firefighting department is the most challenging thing that has ever happened to them. During past crises, the fire and police support staff would be affected but most of the time frontline fire and police were never cut. Given that between 40 and 80 percent of city budgets are allocated to public safety, it was impossible to avoid cutting salaries of uniformed services (Martin, Levey & Cawley, 2012). The most significant question in the minds of stakeholders right now is whether the constant threats of cuts and layoffs are making the fire and rescue members learn anything. The most significant concern is whether the fire service is devising smarter ways of deploying resources at a time when there are many shrinking departments and budgets. On the other hand, police departments in larger cities have embraced a data-driven and sophisticated approach that is assisting them in their work. The approach they police are using allows them to maintain a relatively high level of performance. However, the willingness of the fire service to embrace data as a method of revamping how EMS, fire suppression, and other related calls are handled is discouraging. The most significant part of firefighting is still based on fixed and geographically distributed stations which are staffed by a specific number of experts who wait to be dispatched when they are required (Walters, 2011).
However, for the fire service to continue its operations in these tough times, they have to embrace change actively. But that is not something that the fire service can easily do. The widely spread and most significant changes in the fire service are that several calls that are made to the fire department are not for fires, they are for medical emergencies. Moreover, most calls are sometimes false and therefore not serious. The problem that exists in the fire department is that only a few departments have well adapted to the realities of life (Martin, Levey & Cawley, 2012). For instance, San Jose up to now still sends an attack pumper containing a full complement of firefighters (4) to all emergency calls that are medical related.
However, many officials in the municipality who do not feel confident tangling with the bravest and the best in the community find it difficult to ask so many questions about deployment and workforce. An alternative to this is that one should ask departments for up to date and stable data on demand. Firefighting in the United States is driven by long-standing practices and current information on whatever is happening on the ground, which includes response times, time of the day, geographical distribution, and seriousness of the event (Warner, 2012). The practices are measured about the geometry of the workforce, deployment, and equipment of fire service.
In conclusion, firefighters have had a hard time adapting to the changes in the municipality economies. Therefore, they have had to make many difficult decisions in their departments to ensure that they adapt to the changes in the municipality economic crises. For the fire service to respond efficiently to the crises at hand, they have to change their operations and include more services that are medical related. Also, they should embrace the use of data in their services.
References
England, R. E., & Brown, A. (2014). Fiscal Stress and Cutback Management among United States Fire Departments. International Fire Service Journal of Leadership & Management , 8 .
Dornhelm , R. (2010, September 29). Fire Stations Cut Services As City Budgets Shrink. National Public Radio . Retrieved from https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130018464
Horner, D., & Ivacko, T. M. (2016, June 16). Firefighting Services in Michigan: Challenges and Approaches among Local Governments. Michigan Public Policy Survey, 2016. Retrieved from https://ssrn.com/abstract=2797452
Martin, L. L., Levey, R., & Cawley, J. (2012). The “new normal” for local government. State and Local Government Review , 44 (1_suppl), 17S-28S.
Walters, J. (2011). Firefighters Feel the Squeeze of Shrinking Budgets . Retrieved from http://www.governing.com/topics/finance/firefighters-feel-squeeze-shrinking-budgets.html
Warner, M. E. (2012). Local government restructuring in a time of fiscal stress. Public jobs and political agendas: The public sector in an era of economic stress , 41-58.
Williams, E., Leachman, M., & Johnson, N. (2011 ). State budget cuts in the new fiscal year are unnecessarily harmful . https://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-cuts-in-the-new-fiscal-year-are-unnecessarily-harmful
