‘What Next?’ Not ‘Why Us?’
As the city of Vallejo, Calif., races toward bankruptcy, firefighter unions are asking “Why us?” But they should be asking “What next?”
An article in the San Jose Mercury News reports that Vallejo, a medium-sized city at the northern end of the San Francisco Bay, faces a $6 million budget shortfall this year with a deficit of $14 million projected next year. And Vallejo may be nothing more than the tip of a very large iceberg.
The paper cites public employee pay and benefit spirals spawned by two problems — comparisons among communities rather than comparable private sector jobs and binding arbitration decisions — for unsustainable public safety payrolls. Rising overtime claims, fueled by cozy relationships with unions and among employees to help colleagues boost their pensions, also erode efforts to improve the certainty and security of public safety budgets.
Like most cities, public safety consumes the lion‘s share of municipal revenues in Vallejo. Fire and police salaries and benefits consume the vast majority of that large slice of the municipal budget pie. Unlike many of their peers in other cities, Vallejo firefighters have enjoyed significant wage increases at a time when revenues have remained more or less stagnant. A new wage agreement in 2007 granted firefighters a 9% pay hike while maintaining employer contributions to the generous CALPERS retirement system.
An independent citizens’ group, citing information obtained from city payroll records, demonstrated that the median income of a uniformed Vallejo Fire Department official in 2006 topped $157,000, while the median income of Vallejo residents sat around $54,000. The top-paid fire department employee’s W-2 form reported a whopping $359,000 in gross income during his last year of employment, a figure that would appear to guarantee a pension wage equal to or greater than the average enjoyed by his still-working former colleagues.
Community activists have accused the local firefighter union leaders and high-ranking fire department officials with nothing short of corruption in the handling of firefighter pay issues. Claims and counterclaims have consumed local media coverage and public discourse for much of the past year without resolving the looming fiscal crisis.
An outside observer might reasonably wonder whether either side in the Vallejo budget dispute recognizes its complicity in this disaster. Firefighters, like other public servants, deserve a decent wage for their work. Most public servants receive generous benefits that make up, in part, for pay that usually lags behind comparably qualified private-sector occupations. They also receive employment conditions that protect their tenure to a far greater degree than most other workers and generally have enjoyed greater consideration of tenure than performance in pay and promotional decisions.
Local elected officials agreed to the generous employment and remuneration conditions for Vallejo firefighters despite ample evidence that their conditions not only were fair, but also were competitive. By committing to these conditions despite ample demands for fiscal restraint — remember Proposition 13? — they bound their fellow citizens to a commitment they clearly cannot keep.
When firefighters employed under collective agreements are earning more than the exempt executives overseeing their departments and many private-sector senior executives and professionals, it seems reasonable to ask what‘s wrong with this picture. When firefighters‘ average salaries and benefits are nearly three times the local median wage, citizens could reasonably question the morality of the situation.
“We deserve whatever we can get,” is not a reasonable answer to reasonable remuneration for firefighters. The dangers of the job do not justify additional pay; they demand a well-trained and engaged work force that practices what it preaches.
The days when fire department vacancies attracted hundreds of applicants for a handful of jobs may be gone, but so too is any illusion that candidates for fire department jobs require special qualities beyond a simple and deeply felt desire to serve. As such, competition for candidates should be seen as a need to invest more money in firefighter training and fire prevention instead of higher pay and better benefits.
Leading Democrat presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama has outlined a plan for a program to promote public service and civic engagement in exchange for college tuition benefits. Notwithstanding concerns about the prospective costs of the Democrat‘s proposal, Republican frontrunner Sen. John McCain unsurprisingly seems to support calls for national service. The success of these efforts will depend on local opportunities to engage young people in activities that serve the needs of their fellow citizens. And few needs rank higher among citizens than safety and security.
Before the unions tell us why engaging young people as volunteer firefighters or EMTs will undermine the safety of the community or firefighters mdash; and they will say that — we better ask ourselves what we are prepared to do to see something like this work. Firefighters have an overriding obligation to serve their communities not just themselves. If they can’t or won’t reconcile their interests with those of their communities, we must not only support efforts to encourage a national service program that will supply communities with the willing and able volunteers needed to ensure their protection, but also do everything we can to make sure it succeeds.
March 7th, 2008 at 11:42 am
Mark is right. They paid/union firefighter WILL say volunteers will undermine them. Volunteerism has saved many communities thousands of dollars. Many communities have a full time day time force, leaving volunteers doing dutiies during the 5pm to 8pm daily and weekend times. Volunteers can be and most are trained and qualified just like they’re paid counterparts. Yes I am a volunteer. Would I like to have been paid? Sure. The closest town with paid people was loacted 15 miles away. My commitment to my community was first. My skills were honed there and my loyalty is there. I would have brought those qualities to a paid position. Many of my volunteer brethern are also paid. But the unions feel that no monetary cost is too high, up to the point of bankrupting a local government. This has been the case time and time again and will continue to occur (and not just the fire union, you cop unions are just as guilty), forcing budgetary cuts in man power and services. In some cases, school budgets have been cut to save emergency services.
Someday we will learn, it’s just not going to be soon.
March 9th, 2008 at 4:30 pm
A brave but yet good article. The fire service needs to re-examine their mission and it’s impact on the community. It is simply not just waiting around for a fire and negotiating the biggest and best contract
March 9th, 2008 at 8:37 pm
Looks like it’s all Chiefs and no indians doing the union bashing. Instead of blaming the unions why doesn’t anyone see whoo is accountable for this!.
Someone agreed to it besides the unions. How about get one of those chiefs to spend some time doing a budget and spend less time doing crosswords for the rest of his drop program career and figure it out.
No it’s easier to blame the union. Next time we’ll punch you in the stomach so your blame seems more legitamate.
March 10th, 2008 at 2:40 pm
Chuck– If you read carefully, I don’t let the elected officials or the incumbent chief off the hook at all. It takes two to tango, and in this case it seems to me a lot of people attended the prom.
I would find your criticism much easier to accept if we were talking about chiefs whose vested interests in maintaining the status quo weren’t essentially the same as the unions representing the rank-and-file. I’d like to see more chiefs take a stand on management’s side of the table, but that doesn’t often occur. And that, my friend, is the whole point of the article!
March 12th, 2008 at 1:53 am
Mark, I think there is more to the story than the “whopping” single example of a retirement buy-out salary of $359,000. FF hourly rates of $35 (+/-) is a median hourly rate for Bay Area jobs. OT is driven by minimum staffing requirements that fall line with NFPA standards. The Cities own contracted study (Citygate) showed that the current staffing levels were described as “adequate”. Additionally, your comment describing ‘rising overtime claims to boost pensions’ is completely inaccurate. Overtime is not part of any PERS formula, which determines pensions.
March 12th, 2008 at 3:44 pm
Dick– I am glad to see a Vallejo firefighter joining this discussion, especially one who also seems to live in the community. Your input might help clarify a few things.
For starters, how does someone earn more than $359,000 in a single year working in the fire service? How much of that is overtime? (Thanks for clarifying the CalPERS rules governing overtime. I stand corrected, but still marvel at the generous benefits enjoyed by Vallejo firefighters compared with your peers in so many other American communities. From what I can tell, it still seems likely that the top-paid Vallejo firefighter will have earned a pension above the median salary of his former colleagues. Is this true?)
Very few public safety employees in Vallejo seem to make less than $100,000 per year. If this is “normal” in the Bay Area, why doesn’t the Vallejo contract include neighboring cities like Benicia and Fairfield in its salary benchmark calculations?
Justifying staffing levels and overtime claims by citing NFPA 1710 only serves to underscore my concerns about the undemocratic and practically immoral situation giving rise to current fiscal crisis in Vallejo. If the fire service systematically skews the rules of the game to suit the results favored by its members, are communities obliged to accept these terms?
Studies suggesting “adequate” staffing beg the question, “Just what level of service does the community require from its fire department?” How much did IAFF Local 1186’s political action committee expend on the campaigns to elect the city councillors who commissioned this study?
Getting to the bottom of what constitutes a reasonable level of fire service raises a central and important question, “How do we know how effective any fire department is?” Few communities attempt to answer these questions, and those that do so rarely approach the problem with any degree of rigor. Consequently, not one published, peer-reviewed, empirical study exists to demonstrate that staffing levels influence the quality of fire outcomes in terms of fire losses. Studies showing a relationship between response time and outcome illustrate just how dependent the results are on factors beyond the control of any fire department.
After a community achieves a minimum threshold response capability, seconds’ difference in response times make very little measurable difference in aggregate. Sure, firefighters can make a difference in this fire or that fire, but the benefits accrue not to communities as a whole but to individuals. When asked to choose, citizens in a democratic society have a right say “no” to requests to pay for services that do not benefit them or the community as a whole.
Has anyone ever asked the citizens of Vallejo to consider the costs and benefits of paying for a system that is bound to bankrupt their community? Honest efforts to secure the buy-in of local communities require that people have all the information necessary to make an reasoned choice.
My read on the situation suggests that Vallejo residents’ interests have taken a back seat to those of employees, many of whom do not share the burden of paying for the services they deliver. You seem to be one of the few exceptions in this community.
We do not by virtue either or our status as public employees or our expertise as firefighters earn the right to tell the community what it deserves much less what it must or must not accept in the way of service. I stand by my observation that this situation needs to change, and fire service leaders must prepare for that change by accepting responsibility for accommodating alternate ways of determining service levels and delivering services to their communities.
March 12th, 2008 at 10:58 pm
I have a lot of friends that are firefighters in the Bay Area and every one of them makes over $200K a year and even with OT days they are off for half the month and all work other jobs. Most of the guys have not been to an actual fire in years and they do almost nothing around the fire house since young Junior College fire science guys do all the work for them (even cooking and cleaning) hoping to get a job some day. While I am still working my ass off in my 40’s my firefighter friends all plan to retire at 50 when they will get 90% (3% per year) of what they made the last year. By playing the “overtime game” to push the last years pay these guys are able to “retire” at 50 and make over $200K. Most of tse guys will get another job as a fire cheif somewhere and be making more than the president of the United States (all with 2 years of Junior College)…
March 13th, 2008 at 5:29 pm
“For starters, how does someone earn more than $359,000 in a single year working in the fire service? How much of that is overtime? “
For starters, that is a one time buy-out. That is salary+overtime+ sick leave+holiday pay+compensatory time, all converted to cash for a retirement. The sick leave, compensatory time, holiday leave ect… is an accumulation over a 30+ year career and is not reflective of a “single year” wage. Ironically, when the city was threatening to lay off 13 paramedics and the issue of “buy outs” for all 13 paramedics was raised, the city and supporters showed little or no concern, as it was labeled “one-time-money”. As to “how much of that is overtime”, I do not know, I have no access to those records.
One of the base lines for “adequate” staffing levels was, the size of districts, to allow an acceptable response time based on CPR criteria.
March 14th, 2008 at 11:18 am
Dick– Thanks for the clarification about retirement buyouts. As you can see, the contribution by Bay Area Taxpayer says a lot about how the pay and benefits of firefighters plays with the public. I can’t say it any better than that. We need to recognize the circumstances underlying such sentiments. Few citizens employed in the private sector enjoy the security of tenure, and even those with relatively stable employment prospects have seen their pay and benefits eroded as their employers strive to remain competitive in a global economy.
I can easily understand why elected officials would prefer a big one-time buy-out to continuing obligations to unsustainable pay and benefits claims. These expenses are much easier to justify and absorb if you don’t face the ongoing burden of rising salary and benefit demands.
As for benchmarking staffing and response times to CPR criteria, why wouldn’t the fire department simply expand its efforts to train the public how to perform CPR. I know that many school districts now include CPR as a mandatory element in their secondary school health curricula.
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