Fire Agreement Includes Staffing Drop

The city and the firefighters union have reached an agreement that would allow department minimum staffing levels to drop from 72 to 69 per shift, if the chief is open to scrapping all of the department’s ambulance units.

City Director of Labor Relations Thomas McCarthy and Local 825 firefighters union President Frank Ricci inked that new Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on Friday.

The new agreement comes over a year after Local 825’s last contract expired on June 30, 2018.

Fire Chief John Alston declined to comment on the MOU. He noted that the terms included in the document are just one part of the larger ongoing negotiations over a new firefighters union contract.

“We are still in active negotiations with the union, with the MOU and other items on the table,” Alston said. ​“It would be a poor policy on my part to discuss that matter any further.”

Alston declined to comment on when that new final contract might be signed. Once it is, the Board of Alders will have to vote on the proposed contract before it goes into effect.

The 14-page agreement, which can be read in full here, centers around a key change to section 37.3 in the Company Staffing / Personnel Levels area of the contract.

The updated staffing section gives the fire chief the ​“right and discretion to drop staffing to (69).” The current fire union contract requires that the city staff a minimum of 72 firefighters at all hours of the day.

Since each firefighter costs on average $107,000 per year when including salary and fringe benefits, and since the department currently employs around four firefighters for every position in order to meet the minimum staffing requirement, the agreed-upon staffing drop of three positions could see the elimination of upwards of 12 individual staffers. That would be nearly $1.3 million in personnel savings every year.

The chief can achieve that staffing level drop, per the MOU, only by removing all of the city’s paramedic-staffed Advanced Life Support (ALS) emergency medical units out of service and redeploying some of the personnel to existing squads.

“In order to exercise the medic engine provision,” the MOU reads, ​“the Fire Chief shall have 60 medics in suppression Department-wide, with a right to use Captains and Lieutenants as medics within the 60 in service (provided that all contractual provisions concerning medics are in effect) or to pause or drop ALS service.

“The Fire Chief shall have the right to remove three emergency units from service, redeploying one person as an Incident Management Technician responsible for the command board, accountability, and transportation. The remaining personnel from the redeployment shall staff one Squad company, maintaining staffing levels at 69.”

If the chief does not exercise the staffing reduction option, then the department will staff three ALS ambulance units, which is up from its current number of two. And it will decrease the number of heavy rescue/tactical companies from two to one.

The new agreement also allows all current firefighters the ability to purchase pension time for each year of active city service, and have that time credited for pension services for up to a maximum of four years.

And it allows the chief to limit the number of employees who may be on vacation at any one time to 12 employees per division. ​“Further limitations on divisional vacation approvals may be,” it reads, “(1) Chief Officer (defined as Battalion Chief or Deputy Chief) may be off, two (2) Captains may be off, four (4) Lieutenants may be off and five (5) Firefighters may be off at a time. Included in the five (5) firefighters permitted to be off at one time, one (1) firefighter assigned to Heavy Rescue may be off.”

“What the union gets out of this MOU is something I’ve been fighting for publicly for years,” Ricci told the Independent. ​“It ensures that there’s a neighborhood fire engine in every district for years to come. It ensures that when somebody calls 9 – 1‑1, that 90 percent of the time, within four minutes, their neighborhood fire engine is going to be able to respond and help them.”

Ricci also praised the staffing compromise as helping the city save money and deliver higher levels of service through the addition of a new ALS unit. He called on the department to make sure to hire and train enough paramedics to make sure that the new ALS unit is properly staffed.

“Labor and management working together have put out a roadmap that could save the city millions and millions in staffing reductions while potentially delivering a higher level of service,” he said.

According to the most recent budget narrative, the department responded to 26,354 incidents in Fiscal Year 2018 – 19 (FY19). Over 69 percent, or 18,210, of those incidents were medical calls and 17 percent, or 4,675, were fire incidents.

At around $33.7 million, the fire department’s operating budget makes up just over 6 percent of the city’s overall general fund in the city budget that went into effect on July 1.