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It has nothing to do with Mrs. Smith …
. . . and everything to do with local political power
A guaranteed groaner when teaching a fire officer course is to talk about “Mrs. Smith” or The Phoenix Way. Firefighters are quick to point out that they are not in a retail trade. Users of 9-1-1 are called victims or patients, not customers.
The Phoenix Way does not travel well outside the Valley of the Sun. It makes no difference if the plan was lifted from the PFD website out-of-context or implemented by a retired Phoenix command officer at a new fire department.
But in the city where it started, it is protecting firefighter jobs. There were two significant pressures in Phoenix that provide an example of carbon transformed into a diamond.
PRO-BUSINESS WITH A BULLET
Phoenix public safety unions won the right to collective bargaining in the early 1980s. One result of this political activism was a firefighter-initiated referendum to replace the at-large city council system with single member district elections. This eroded the ability of business leaders to influence city operations.
Phoenix is lead by old-school Republican conservatives. It is the home of two senators who were presidential candidates, Barry Goldwater and John McCain. In the 1980s and 1990s the police chief functioned as a political operative, using his law enforcement authority to investigate and harass political foes. (HERE)
Just before the 1982 single-member district referendum vote occured, more than a dozen firefighters, including the union president, were arrested on cocaine charges. Duane Pell, a former city council member and IAFF Local 493 leader, talked about this incident in a 1993 Phoenix New Times article.
“The headlines were firefighters involved in major drug trafficking, a system of drug trafficking that, because of the convenient location of fire stations throughout the city, made perfect locations for firefighters to distribute cocaine,” says Pell, describing the allegations. Most of the firefighters were cleared of criminal charges and no major drug ring was ever found.
This arrest started a decade of intimidation and harassment of the union president. Eleven years after the unfounded cocaine arrest, IAFF Local 493 President Pat Cantelme filed a $1 million lawsuit accusing the police chief, county attorney and others of violating his civil rights. (HERE)
WE COULD ALWAYS CONTRACT WITH RURAL-METRO
During this time Scottsdale-based Rural-Metro was a successful for-profit contract fire protection corporation. Imagine working every day in a city that is hostile to organized labor and points to a neighboring private corporation when things get dificult.
APPLYING NATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS BOARD (NLRB) TECHNIQUES
Phoenix started the Labor/Management effort in 1984 using a NLRB Relationship By Objectives (RBO) procedure. RBO is recommended when labor and management are at an impasse. The RBO process created The Phoenix Way, The Big Five and “Be Nice.”
Be Nice covers both the internal (firefighter) and external (Mrs. Smith) customer. During my Phoenix visits I noticed a tremendous effort by the department to encourage, reinforce and reward "nice" behavior. It was a recurrent feature within their internal publications and videos, re-telling customer service stories and celebrating random acts of kindness. Recruit schools include a day of community service.
During a discussion about the department's organizational chart, a PFD captain identified a senior staffer as “the Deputy Chief for Being Nice.” In hard-ball local politics, each positive firefighter/civilian encounter increased citizen support of the department.
BE NICE PRODUCES VOTER SUPPORT
Voters passed Proposition 1 in a September 11, 2007 election. Proposition 1 hikes the sales tax 0.2 percent, which will be used to hire 500 new police officers and 100 new firefighters within the next two years. (source - Goldwater Institute)
During an October 2008 budget work session, the Associated Press reported “… a majority of the City Council expressed support for increasing the public-safety budget by $10 million, or about 1.3 percent, while cutting the other departments by 25 percent to 45 percent.”
PROPOSED FY 2010 BUDGET
With a budget deficit approaching $270 million - a 22% reduction in projected revenue - city agencies were directed to provide budgets reflecting a 30% reduction of expenditures. Public safety was directed to provide a 15% reduction. Courts, police and fire account for 68% of the city expenditures.
The proposed FY2010 budget released last week calls for elimination of 1,300 of the exising 14,000 city jobs. (HERE) This reduction is on top of a $90 million budget cut in early 2008.
NONE of the 1,588 firefighter postions are eliminated in the proposed FY10 budget. The department will be losing some of their 350 civilian employees and will run no recruit schools in 2009. The fire department will reduce it’s FY10 budget by 7.5%. (HERE),
“Seventy percent of our general fund goes to first responders,” said Councilman Michael Nowakowski. “You can’t cut from police and fire because it’s a need. Our city is growing and we need officers on the street and firefighters and paramedics out there to protect our families.”
This is a far cry from the city council sentiments in the 1990s, when candidates ran against public safety labor and their featherbedded jobs. Maybe being nice is not just a warm and fuzzy sentiment.
Mike “Fossilmedic” Ward
Diamond or Dust budget series
From my January 05, 2009 posting on Firegeezer.com.
A guaranteed groaner when teaching a fire officer course is to talk about “Mrs. Smith” or The Phoenix Way. Firefighters are quick to point out that they are not in a retail trade. Users of 9-1-1 are called victims or patients, not customers.
The Phoenix Way does not travel well outside the Valley of the Sun. It makes no difference if the plan was lifted from the PFD website out-of-context or implemented by a retired Phoenix command officer at a new fire department.
But in the city where it started, it is protecting firefighter jobs. There were two significant pressures in Phoenix that provide an example of carbon transformed into a diamond.
PRO-BUSINESS WITH A BULLET
Phoenix public safety unions won the right to collective bargaining in the early 1980s. One result of this political activism was a firefighter-initiated referendum to replace the at-large city council system with single member district elections. This eroded the ability of business leaders to influence city operations.
Phoenix is lead by old-school Republican conservatives. It is the home of two senators who were presidential candidates, Barry Goldwater and John McCain. In the 1980s and 1990s the police chief functioned as a political operative, using his law enforcement authority to investigate and harass political foes. (HERE)
Just before the 1982 single-member district referendum vote occured, more than a dozen firefighters, including the union president, were arrested on cocaine charges. Duane Pell, a former city council member and IAFF Local 493 leader, talked about this incident in a 1993 Phoenix New Times article.
“The headlines were firefighters involved in major drug trafficking, a system of drug trafficking that, because of the convenient location of fire stations throughout the city, made perfect locations for firefighters to distribute cocaine,” says Pell, describing the allegations. Most of the firefighters were cleared of criminal charges and no major drug ring was ever found.
This arrest started a decade of intimidation and harassment of the union president. Eleven years after the unfounded cocaine arrest, IAFF Local 493 President Pat Cantelme filed a $1 million lawsuit accusing the police chief, county attorney and others of violating his civil rights. (HERE)
WE COULD ALWAYS CONTRACT WITH RURAL-METRO
During this time Scottsdale-based Rural-Metro was a successful for-profit contract fire protection corporation. Imagine working every day in a city that is hostile to organized labor and points to a neighboring private corporation when things get dificult.
APPLYING NATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS BOARD (NLRB) TECHNIQUES
Phoenix started the Labor/Management effort in 1984 using a NLRB Relationship By Objectives (RBO) procedure. RBO is recommended when labor and management are at an impasse. The RBO process created The Phoenix Way, The Big Five and “Be Nice.”
Be Nice covers both the internal (firefighter) and external (Mrs. Smith) customer. During my Phoenix visits I noticed a tremendous effort by the department to encourage, reinforce and reward "nice" behavior. It was a recurrent feature within their internal publications and videos, re-telling customer service stories and celebrating random acts of kindness. Recruit schools include a day of community service.
During a discussion about the department's organizational chart, a PFD captain identified a senior staffer as “the Deputy Chief for Being Nice.” In hard-ball local politics, each positive firefighter/civilian encounter increased citizen support of the department.
BE NICE PRODUCES VOTER SUPPORT
Voters passed Proposition 1 in a September 11, 2007 election. Proposition 1 hikes the sales tax 0.2 percent, which will be used to hire 500 new police officers and 100 new firefighters within the next two years. (source - Goldwater Institute)
During an October 2008 budget work session, the Associated Press reported “… a majority of the City Council expressed support for increasing the public-safety budget by $10 million, or about 1.3 percent, while cutting the other departments by 25 percent to 45 percent.”
PROPOSED FY 2010 BUDGET
With a budget deficit approaching $270 million - a 22% reduction in projected revenue - city agencies were directed to provide budgets reflecting a 30% reduction of expenditures. Public safety was directed to provide a 15% reduction. Courts, police and fire account for 68% of the city expenditures.
The proposed FY2010 budget released last week calls for elimination of 1,300 of the exising 14,000 city jobs. (HERE) This reduction is on top of a $90 million budget cut in early 2008.
NONE of the 1,588 firefighter postions are eliminated in the proposed FY10 budget. The department will be losing some of their 350 civilian employees and will run no recruit schools in 2009. The fire department will reduce it’s FY10 budget by 7.5%. (HERE),
“Seventy percent of our general fund goes to first responders,” said Councilman Michael Nowakowski. “You can’t cut from police and fire because it’s a need. Our city is growing and we need officers on the street and firefighters and paramedics out there to protect our families.”
This is a far cry from the city council sentiments in the 1990s, when candidates ran against public safety labor and their featherbedded jobs. Maybe being nice is not just a warm and fuzzy sentiment.
Mike “Fossilmedic” Ward
Diamond or Dust budget series
From my January 05, 2009 posting on Firegeezer.com.
Add a Comment
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Comment by Mick Mayers on January 18, 2009 at 10:53pm
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I was going to post something along the lines of what Ben said, then read to the bottom and found that Ben said it. Maybe that's because we're at the same place and bought into it wholesale. I just need to be quicker than he is next time.
I can understand the squeamishness for some people to use that "c-word" because it makes what we do seem pretty mercenary. But you know, marketing your service isn't a bad thing. In the right context, it is the act of educating the public and elected officials as to what it is we do, why it is important, and what's going to happen if it goes away.
Unfortunately, it seems like the "what's going to happen if it goes away" part disappears pretty quickly after the last significant incident. If we can approach our "sales pitch" in a more tasteful manner- getting the public to understand we want to serve them- I think it sits better all around.
There seems to be a significant percentage of our fire service population, however, who simply don't like the concept of being "servants". They got into the fire service for the "power" and the adrenaline surge. To these people, they believe the public should be bowing down and kissing our feet for what we do for them. "What, you aren't grateful for our service?"
I'm looking around at today's economy and right now I'm pretty glad we embraced a customer service philosophy at our department. I'm especially hoping it continues to help our department as we go into some tough budget decisions in the next few weeks, as it has helped us so far for the past fifteen years.
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Comment by Ben Waller on January 11, 2009 at 2:59pm
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Art,
The people whom we serve are customers, like it or not. "Victims" included the customer definition, but victims are a subset of "customer", not the entire group.
Phoenix FD has a long and favorable track record of publich support and funding - far better than virtually any other large department - compared to virtually every other large U.S. city. With the current economy, public sector customers are getting a strong reality check in the arena of "you get what you pay for" just like the private sector.
One of the ways in which private sector companies define their customers is by realizing that customers can choose with whom they do business. So can public sector customers. There are at least two ways that they can make that choice.
The first is to introduce competition into the local market. Ask the places that have eliminated public-sector fire or EMS provides and contracted those services out to Rural-Metro or similar private companies.
The second way that customers can introduce choice into the local market is to simply move out of that market. Check out the national demographic changes for the past 30 years to see how this works. Very few of the larger northeast and midwest industrial cities that used to count on constant population growth to maintain or expand fire and other public safety services can still do that. They're mostly disbanding fire companies, closing stations, using brownouts, and other cost-saving tactics because they have lost too many paying customers to keep their business operating without cutbacks.
Customer service can take a lot of forms. That includes the critical customer services that we provide those VIP customers - the victims of fires, wrecks, assaults, medical emergencies, and hazardous environments.
Ben
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Comment by Mike Ward on January 11, 2009 at 4:55am
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Oops, the correct term for the DCFEMS units are COMMUNITY SERVICE UNITS. Thanks to the brother that pointed that out. There is one per battaiion, a total of six.
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Christopher,
Thanks for the post, the original Firegeezer blog includes reaction in Baltimore and Washington DC and a picture of the DC Customer Service Units - a mutation of customer service, water supply, ems frequent flyers and home smoke detector/inspections.
The water company bought the trucks after a greater alarm apartment fire was hampered by poor water pressure. Go HERE to read Vito Maggiolo’s dcfd.com article (need to scroll down to December 2nd)
There is a link to a thread from TheWatchDesk where the DC firefighters reflect on their expanded responsibilities. (HERE)
Just got off the phone with Brian Crandell, a Montana firefighter/educator who I often met at Brunacini presentations and Phoenix Fire Department seminars. He developed the "Training In Context" initiative while working as a state training coordinator. He completed his doctorate in education and is Assistant Chief of the Central Valley (MT) Fire District. He will be presenting "Training That Works in the Street" at FDIC this year.
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Comment by Art "ChiefReason" Goodrich on January 6, 2009 at 3:00pm
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My little sis works in a nursing home and she calls the residents "consumers". Man; that really frosts my...
mug.
When I first saw a reference to victims as "customers", that made my blood boil. And it still does.
If we treat victims of horrific events as customers, then we lose some of that compassion that made us want to join in the first place. If you want to provide "customer service" to "customers", go to work in a restaurant or retail.
Someone who has had their entire life's work burnt out to nothing but a shell is not a "customer". They are a victim.
Yeah; we can treat a lot of what we do LIKE a business; except the people that we provide our service to. They need to be treated like they were YOUR mom or dad.
I like Brunicini for his wit and SOME of his wisdom. And he had knee replacement, which gives us something in common.
Well; we were both chiefs; he being a little more well known than me. I know; I know. I struggle with it, too.
Excellent blog, Mike.
I am a big fan of history.
TCSS.
Art
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strtcopr, you may have missed my point. Two decades of being nice in a community hostile to organized labor has resulted in NO projected firefighter layoffs in July 2009 ... cannot say the same for many large metro fire departments.
The application of PFD principles to other departments has not been as successful. Each department has a different history and stress points.
The PFD Way was born during systematic harrassment of both the union president and the fire chief. When the results of the AzScam bribery investigation was made public, it was clear that the police chief targeted the IAFF local president and Chief Brunacini.
In addition, these actions were done in the shadow of the most successful for-profit contract fire protection corporation. Some elected officials advocated privatization of municipal fire departments in the Valley of the Sun. Today that is not an issue, but it was a significant factor in the 1980s and early 90s.
Every positive citizen/firefighter encounter was a win for "the good guys," every effort to take care of the internal customer helped the department thrive.
Where do I imply that "everybody in the country seems to know more than Brunacini"?
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Comment by Christopher J. Naum, SFPE on January 5, 2009 at 10:11pm
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Mike,
Very nice posting.....
Its interesting to see the depth and degree of various threads and comments that were linked to the posting on Firegeezer.com....
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