Mayor Carolyn Kirk yesterday said the firefighter union's rejection of a $25,000 overtime giveback had pushed the city into an extreme state of vulnerability to fires and medical emergencies that's likely to last through June 30, the end of the current budget cycle.
The Fire Department doesn't have a dime in its operational reserve just as summer vacations, which always deplete staffing, are beginning to cut into roll call counts, and can't be counted on to keep the city safe, Chief Barry McKay told City Council on Tuesday night.
"Given what you have remaining," council President Bruce Tobey asked McKay, "can you reasonably protect the people of this city?"
"No," McKay answered. "We have no overtime; this is the bottom."
The mayor blamed the union for scotching a deal that was negotiated by the union leadership to infuse enough emergency money into the department to maintain the barebones staffing of the past six months.
"This was a package deal," Kirk told the Times. "The administration stepped up, the union leadership stepped up, but the union majority killed the deal.
"They need to take responsibility," the mayor said of rank-and-file firefighters.
Union President Barry Aptt disagreed. In an interview, he said the problem was "bad management and no money."
Even with a small amount of overtime money for shoring up shifts, absences for vacation and other contractually allowed reasons, including union activities, since November all three neighborhood substations have been shuttered 10 times, leaving only Central Station at the ready.
The union's refusal last Friday to give back to the city $25,000 appropriated to pay overtime for training actually cost the department more than twice that. The City Council, reacting to the union vote, backed off on bringing in a match from the stabilization fund.
Councilors voted 5-2, with one abstention, against adding $26,801 into McKay's operational reserve for use in recalling firefighters to keep at least one of the neighborhood stations open in the vacation season of May and June.
Under a policy directive from the mayor, McKay will be allowed deficit spending to bring firefighters back to work to fight multiple alarm fires.
But the chief conceded to the council that as many as 30 life-and-death minutes can be lost finding and getting off-duty firefighters back to their stations, into uniform and to the scene of a fire.
He also explained that he no longer will call in off-duty firefighters when a department ambulance is diverted to Beverly Hospital from Addison Gilbert, a practice that has been on the rise. Instead of substituting off-duty firefighters, McKay said he would now close a neighborhood station during the time — typically two hours — the ambulance and crew of two are on the run to Beverly and back. While the ambulance is away, the neighborhood team of two would be brought back to Central Station on School Street.
Kirk was sitting in the first row Tuesday night when the council debated and voted down the stabilization-fund deduction that she proposed in February in the aftermath of the eight-alarm Lorraine Apartments fire in mid-December.
The union leadership had agreed with her proposal to bundle $25,000 in training funds with $26,801, the tabulated overtime amount for the Lorraine fire, to be drawn from the stabilization fund to keep at least the West Gloucester neighborhood station open all the time, along with Central Station.
The proposal came just days after Super Bowl Sunday, which saw so few firefighters appear for work that even West Gloucester was forced to close for first time since 1992. Of 19 firefighters assigned to work the game-day night shift, 12 appeared — only enough to staff the apparatus on School Street.
After the union vote, Aptt blamed himself for his inability to convince the majority of the union membership to approve the giveback. He said about 30 members participated in the debate and then split more than 2-1 against the deal the leadership had hammered out with the administration in a series of meetings since March.
He told the Times the pivotal attitude was distrust of the city and McKay.
The same attitude was cited to explain why a majority of firefighters in 2004 opposed a $1.1 million override that was earmarked publically to maintain fire station operations and teachers. The electorate turned down the tax hike by better than a 4-1 ratio.
Immediately after the override vote, McKay began the periodic closing of neighborhood stations, a policy that continued until October 2006 when a woman was killed in a fire in Lanesville while the Bay View substation, less than two miles away, was closed.
Then-Mayor John Bell ordered McKay to reopen the stations all the time.
The stations stayed open but during last June's budget negotiations, McKay warned that his overtime proposal was cut by $100,000 to $400,000, which he said would be gone by February or March.
The council encouraged him to keep the stations opened and tacitly invited him to come back for a supplemental appropriation when the money was gone.
By September last year, the overtime was all but spent, but the administration reneged on a commitment to find money for transfer into the department except for about $50,000, which also was consumed during the fall and winter.
Tobey told the Times the dire state of fire and medical response from the department could last through all of fiscal 2009. Kirk said she expected to propose a minimal amount of firefighter overtime in the budget now in preparation.
But she also said the city cannot expect to staff all three neighborhood stations on a regular basis.
A policy shift that would leave the outlying stations closed more often but would insure that Central Station would be fully staffed was introduced in March.
The union leadership and mayor said they agreed in principle to a new model for deployment that would put optimal-sized teams on trucks at headquarters — even if it means fewer trucks and fewer outlying stations in service.
In fire safety circles, "per piece manning" is the term for the approach that the union and mayor have endorsed during incomplete negotiations to settle a contract that expired last July.
Richard Gaines can be reached at rgaines@gloucestertimes.com.
