Second of two parts
Re Now Is the Time for All Good Firefighters – to Compromise? To Double Down?”
If Jacksonville, a consolidated city/county government experiencing less budget pain than most large municipalities, is forcing cuts to fire and rescue, it’s easy to predict what’s going on in the rest of the country. The litany of cuts, compromises, givebacks and service reductions is astonishing.
In the wake of losing 23 firefighter positions in the summer of 2010, an almost 25 percent manpower reduction, the Massachusetts town of Lowell is now counting heavily on mutual aid from surrounding towns for fire suppression services. Firefighters in Muskegon, MI, ratified a three-year contract that allows the use of more part-time firefighters. In Baltimore, firefighters were given the option of taking five to eight furlough days or risk losing 100 positions. In the Chicago suburb of Elgin, firefighters agreed to a “no-raise, no-layoff” contract for 2011 that reduced its minimum staffing level from 36 to 34, saving the city a reported $750,000 a year.
Newark firefighters joined in a court challenge at the end of 2010 to contest a city budget that called for laying off hundreds of municipal employees, including two dozen firefighters. San Diego instituted a “rolling brownout” system, whereby certain firehouses are temporarily closed, an initiative that takes more than one-tenth of the city’s fire and rescue complement off the street each day, saving the city nearly $12 million per year.
Meanwhile, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently unveiled a plan to significantly reduce municipal manpower. His plan includes closing some fire stations at night. He is also embracing a proposal by the New York Fire Dept. to charge motorists up to $490 to respond to accidents and car fires.
Why Cuts Have Been Inevitable
“It’s one of the most challenging times I’ve ever seen,” says Tom Wieczorek, former city manager for Iona, MI, and now director of the International City/County Management Assn. Center for Public Safety Management.
In the past, police and fire support staff might have gotten cut, Wieczorek says, but usually front-line police and fire were kept whole. “We’re now seeing communities that have been cutting budgets for the past eight years,” he says. “You can only cut parks and recreation so much.” Given that 40 to 80 percent of municipal budgets go to public safety, it was inevitable that cuts would eventually hit uniformed services.
One big question is whether the fire service is actually learning anything amidst the constant threat of cuts, especially about smarter ways to deploy resources in an era of shrinking budgets and departments. While police departments, especially in larger cities, have embraced a more sophisticated and data-driven approach to the work they do, allowing them to maintain relatively high performance levels, the fire service has been less willing to embrace data as a way to revamp how fire suppression, EMS and other calls are handled.
For the most part, firefighting still is based on geographically distributed, fixed stations staffed by a set number of personnel who stand by and wait to be dispatched when needed. For the fire service to continue to perform in these leaner times, Wieczorek says, it must actively accept change. That does not come easily to the fire service. “The old saying in the fire service,” Wieczorek says, “is ‘100 Years of Tradition, Unimpeded by Progress.’”
One of the most significant and widely recognized changes in the fire and rescue service is that on average, most calls are for medical emergencies and not fires, running about 80 percent EMS to 20 percent fire. Most calls are either false alarms or not particularly serious. Yet too few fire departments have adapted well to these realities. For example, San Jose still sends an attack pumper with a full complement of four firefighters to all emergency medical calls.
Where Is the Logic?
Tying up four firefighters and a rig for what usually wins up being minor medical emergencies doesn’t make any sense, says Bruce Hoover, chief of the Fargo Fire Dept. in North Dakota. Fargo’s protocols used to mirror San Jose’s exactly. Now Fargo fire trucks only roll if “there’s bleeding, breathing complications or trauma,” Hoover says. “We only respond for true medical emergencies. That has cut back our run count by 1,000 a year. It has kept apparatus and manpower in place for real emergencies.”
Asking tough questions about manpower and deployment is difficult for many municipal officials. They don’t feel confident tangling with the community’s best and bravest. A way to do that, however, without going toe-to-toe with the fire service, Wieczorek says, is simply to ask departments for solid, up-to-date data on demand, along with what measurable results a city is getting for its fire service dollars.
Most municipalities will find when they start to ask good questions about budgets, deployment and service demands is that there aren’t many answers. “We are routinely called into communities to look at manpower and deployment,” Wieczorek says. “We find across the board in small and large jurisdictions that data is nonexistent or totally wrong.”
What drives firefighting in the U.S., is long-standing practice, not good, current information on what’s actually happening on the ground, including number of calls, response times, seriousness of the incident, geographical distribution and time of day. They would be measured in relation to the geometry of fire service manpower, equipment and deployment.
A Model of Inefficiency
For example, in one community seeking a thorough analysis of demand, resources and deployment, the busiest five minutes the fire department had in a year were examined. Even at its busiest moment of the year, the city still had seven idle units standing by ready to respond, with 28 available firefighters. Those are the sorts of analyses, combined budget crisis, that have emboldened policymakers and budget writers to start asking tougher questions about what departments really need.
Looking at both budgets and at more creative and data-driven ways to handle staffing and deployment are key. “Don’t get caught up in the hysteria trap of believing that if you pursue things like brownouts and budget cuts that children are going to die and senior citizens will burn up,” Wieczorek says. “That might happen, but only if we keep doing business in the same old ways.”
Jonathan Walters, executive editor of Governing.com, lives in upstate New York and spent 30 years as a journalist covering public policy for the Washington Post, USA Today and others. He may be contacted at jowazz22@gmail.com
