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Fire Department as Scapegoats?
What makes the fire service so easy to use as a scapegoat for local governments hurting for cash? BCFD just disbanded Squad 11 and Truck 15 on 7-9-12 and Truck 10 is supposed to be scheduled to be disbanded in October. However, yesterday their Chief Clack was given a new contract and raise somewhere in the neighborhood of $166,00/yr. In Scranton, the mayor just cut hourly pay to $7.25(minimum wage) for fire service. Thats less than McDonalds pays. Detroit just closed 15 companies, approx 160 or so men. So what makes us the fire service so easy to get rid of? Detroit as we all know, burns all day and night. In Baltimore, the FD is the highest rated public service. So what makes it so easy for politcians to close departments? What can we as a fire service do to combat this?
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Bob Callahan on
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Onee thing to remember is that the fire department, especially career departments, are generally the second or third largest budgets, so the onkly way a city can make meaningful budget cuts is to cut the largest budgets, which includes the FDs.
In Scranton, all city workers have been reduced in pay. In Detroit and Baltimore, the police have also been cut. The fact is in most of these places other city departments as being cut just as much. A cities budget can only be as alarge as revenue, and in many of these places significant chunks have to be cut from the budget.
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Permalink Reply by Cody Patrick on
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In my county they all but scraped funding for fire/ems equip, but the sherriffs office got more money than ever
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Permalink Reply by Jack/dt on
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Fire departments are funded through taxation and the surest way to not get elected/re-elected is to not have a way of cutting the budget. Although try telling the public that their roads will not be maintained, plowed or sanded, or that their trash will not get picked up and they will march on town hall with torches and pitchforks. Tell them that their Fire Department is going to be cannibalized and they are pretty much cool with that. Why? Most people don't have a pressing need for the fire department.
But ultimately it comes down (IMHO) to the fact that people are easily led, look for (and expect to receive) feel good solutions and are easily swayed into believing that someone who is willing to expose themselves everyday to toxic chemicals, dangerous situations and great personal risk of injury and death do not deserve to be compensated at least to the same level of teachers.
Because they didn't get a bonus, a raise, a promotion, or their hours or benefits were cut, or they are unemployed or underemployed, they resent the decent wages that firefighters earn, for doing something they themselves wouldn't be caught dead (pun intended) doing.
It's the rabble rousers who insist on budget cuts, insist that closing stations and laying off firefighters can be done without any increase of risk to the community. But funny thing is, why were all those firefighters hired, and stations built in the first place if they can now be closed without impacting public safety?
People stand up at town budget hearings and complain about high taxes, many honestly think firefighters do nothing all day but watch TV, and these are the people that make the nightly news and the local papers. Good, honest, hardworking citizens who are taxed to the breaking point and are only looking to get by! god bless those good folks. Um...anyone else ever wonder how many of those people have been successfully served by their fire department? I'm betting none of them. Ever see a taxpayer on TV singing praises for their fire department and thrilled with the idea of hiring more, and paying them more? I haven't. But I bet they exist, and I bet they are the one's who were pulled out of a burning apartment or house, cut out of a car or in some way needed and received help from their fire department.
And while fire departments have always been a source of budgetary savings, more recently it's become about the unions and how they are breaking the town budgets. And the great irony is that those people who have traditionally been best served by unions, who would most typically be a union member, have now been hoodwinked into believing that the reason they lost their job, can't find a job, get crappy pay and no benefits is because the unions have stolen all of the money.
But...do you really think that the auto workers would be willing to become non-union? Or steelworkers, carpenters and electricians? The cost of unions in the trades and auto industry are buried and hard to discern. Funny too, how people are now demanding that jobs be brought back to America, that a product should be made in America, but silly fools that they are think that those same American workers should be paid Chinese wages.
The hue and cry about "illegal" immigrants taking American jobs is enough to make a red-blooded Amurican angry as hell and not gonna take it no more. Ironically (again) by making it harder for "illegal" immigrants to find work, the jobs they 'took' from Americans go wanting. The jobs these "illegal" immigrants took are low paying, hard, hot and backbreaking jobs and growers can't find any (or very few) Amuricans willing to do backbreaking labor for shitty pay. But they do expect their firefighters to do a life threatening job for little more than minimum wage.
The best one can hope for is that, as it's always been, as the economy spools up (and it will) people will forget (as they always do), the sun will shine, the sky will be blue and cities will hire/re-hire firefighters, build newer or more stations and all will be swell, until the next downturn and people re-discover that firefighters are greedy, lazy SOBs. Ya gotta love this country!
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Permalink Reply by Moose on
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The politicians will always find a way to increase their pay, and decrease everything else....thats all the politicians (Businessmen) are good for and they dont care about the people. They kiss up to you to get your vote than go sit in their plush offices after driving their government issued car filled with gasoline courtesy of the taxpayers, and whine and complain they are not paid enough to do their jobs...
If the government cut back on their salaries (yah, right) and stopped using fleet vehicles just to get from home to office instead of their own cars (like the rest of us do), and stopped having expensive lunch meetings and banquets, and stopped paying REDICULOUS amounts of money on "studies" and "surveys" and their own campaigns for elections...maybe we could still have enough for decent fire protection? But why are these areas never addressed? Why does a politician need 3 secretaries? (excuse me...administrative assistants). Why does a politician need a whole brood of assistants and executives and advisors all on the payroll??? Cut back on these positions, with the increase in technology politicians never have to leave their offices for meetings any more, just use video conferencing and save on travel.
I am just an average joe-schmo but I can see some areas that can and should be addressed before we get cutting public service like fire, police and EMS.
Sadly...it will take a HUGE conflagration, mass destruction and casualties to wake everyone up. Some big fire will happen and there will not be enough firefighters to handle it and half a city will burn down before politicians will take another look at their "cuts", and hundreds of people will be hurt or loose their life, thousands of people will be homeless, small businesses will be lost as well as the jobs they provided, and the government will spend $35,000 on a study to find out how it all happened.......
We need competent people in offices that care about the people still, and get rid of the "business minded politicians" that are ruining us...
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Permalink Reply by ashfire on
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What everyone needs to do is if they don't have it in the laws of their area is TERM LIMITATIONS and vote it in to law. Limit the years any politician can hold any office they are elected to. Who says they needed the high saleries they get and all their buddies that swing into office with them. They will be gone when their term ends and they can go somewhere else.
I heard where citizens in some town, city or county was allowed to vote for fire and police chief to run their depts.
Maybe we should vote for everyone that sits in the seat of any dept everywhere.Could be some better people out there than those that follow the line up to the top. Just as long as they know what they are doing and not picked because they had something to do with someones election.
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Permalink Reply by John Crabbe on
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I heard where citizens in some town, city or county was allowed to vote for fire and police chief to run their depts.
Maybe we should vote for everyone that sits in the seat of any dept everywhere.Could be some better people out there than those that follow the line up to the topI would heartily disagree with such an idea. I think it is stupid for a police of fire chief to be elected by the people. I think it is stupid that there are departments that elect their own officers, but I can see things getting even worse with a public election of dept heads.
Just like a departmental election, the aspect of a popularity contests seems to carry more weight than qualifications and ability. This gets further compounded when you have many folks who can be rather clueless of what their dept actually does or level of service they provide to start interjecting their vote for a dept they don't understand. It is bad enough that we see elected officials already who think they know how best to run a dept, let alone elect dept heads based off campaign promises.
Whereas it sometimes takes a chief to stand up and represent the members of the dept they serve instead of just caving to political whims. It takes leadership to stand up and say why staffing should be protected, or even increased, or as to why equipment is needed or costs incurred without resorting to, nor worrying about keeping the position in the next election.
Basically I liken such a proposal to elect depts heads just like the a military general or admiral being elected to lead as well. Sorry at some point the election process needs to be trumped by those who know and understand the job and go through a job screening process to get the job as opposed to making campaign promises to the general public.
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Permalink Reply by Ben Waller on
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I disagree with it, too, and pretty much for the same reasons.
Elected officials much of their time just staying elected. Fire Chiefs don't have that kind of time, especially if they're good ones.
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We already have term limits. All it takes is for 51% of the voting populace to vote for a non-incumbent candidate, and the incumbent's term is thereby limits.
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His, ours, the voting 51%, or the elected officials? :-)
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We give elected officials a term of four years and they can run for a second term unless the people decided they want another person to run for a office before a second term.
Years ago before term limitations we had officials in office over 12 years and then the people got smart and said we had enough and run them out at the end of their terms. Then acourse our county was broke and has been trying to climb out of the hole since then and cuttting this and that as they go.
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