As next year’s budget talks loom in a city where money is scare,
the fire chief is prepared to take significant budgetary cuts in
his department, but won’t back down concerning overtime
– an area the mayor has accused his employees of abusing.
As next year’s budget talks loom in a city where money is scare, the fire chief is prepared to take significant budgetary cuts in his department, but won’t back down concerning overtime – an area the mayor has accused his employees of abusing.
Mayor Tony Bruscia and members of the fire department are trading heated accusations about the amount of overtime firefighters are using this year. The department’s overtime budget for this fiscal year was $100,000, which it exceeded by $95,000.
“Our fire department is taking advantage of overtime big time,” Bruscia said. “At a time when we’re going broke and their fellow employees are losing their jobs it’s unconscionable. It’s disgusting and it infuriates me.”
But when Fire Chief Bill Garringer, who is being laid off effective July 1, meets with interim City Manager Clint Quilter tomorrow to discuss the department’s 2004-2005 budget he won’t back down. He is prepared to ask for a smaller budget over all, but not in overtime pay.
“I’m going to ask for what they should have – $195,000,” he said. “It’s what I’ve been asking for the past three years.”
The city is cutting 36 positions, including the fire chief, from almost every city department because of a projected $4 million deficit. Bruscia says he is intent on saving the city money and is looking at the fire department for savings. But the chief and representatives from the firefighters’ union say Bruscia doesn’t have realistic expectations about how the department operates.
On Monday, Bruscia proposed, and the City Council approved, a new task force to help regulate fire affairs, among many other tasks. He also wanted to see if the California Department of Forestry (CDF) could provide fire protection to the city for less money than the Hollister Fire Department. The fire department budget is approximately $3.3 million this year, Garringer said. He did not specify how much less he will be requesting overall.
Bruscia has accused the department of blatantly abusing overtime. Department employees have a clause in their contract that allows captains and engineers who take a day off to be replaced by another captain or engineer – a firefighter cannot take the place of someone of rank, Bruscia said.
“What they’ve done is line it up so they purposely take a day off when they know their buddy can come in on OT,” Bruscia said. “But they’re contractually entitled to it… so the only way we’re really going to stop them is to embarrass them into stopping it.”
Bob Martin Del Campo, a Hollister firefighter and president of the local International Association of Fire Fighters union, blamed a grossly under-budgeted overtime allowance for the excessive overtime use.
“We were set up for failure,” Martin Del Campo said. “The budget is being blown because we got OT hours cut back at the beginning of the fiscal year… With that, it makes it look like we’re in it for ourselves, and that’s not true.”
Garringer has been talking to the union about decreasing the city’s overtime payments by giving his employees a pay raise and reducing the amount of hours they can take off, he said.
That way, the city would pay slightly more for salaries, but considerably less for overtime which is time and a half, he said.
“It would save $65,000 in one year,” Garringer said. “And I’ll be presenting that to Clint on Thursday.”
Bruscia believes the department is fully staffed and should not have such an excessive need for overtime usage.
“We were fully staffed for years and because we’re opening a second station… we gave them an extra two bodies for their department above the fully staffed, which should alleviate even more so the need for OT,” he said. “But instead they’re taking advantage of it… because they’ve got a chief that’s a firefighter’s firefighter. He doesn’t act like an executive in the organization.”
But Garringer said Bruscia doesn’t understand what needs to happen to successfully operate a fire department, which has brought on the onslaught of overtime accusations.
“I don’t even get the courtesy of an opportunity to explain the OT usage to him,” he said. “(He) just doesn’t understand what it is we do.”
The department has 24 full-time firefighters, the chief and a fire marshall, for a total of 26 employees. Martin Del Campo claims that it is understaffed according to the National Fire Protection Association standards, which calls for a ratio of one firefighter for every 1,000 people. Hollister’s population is around 38,000.
Hollister has just enough people to cover the needs of the department every day, Garringer said. If someone takes a day off he has no choice but to use overtime, he said.
The city negotiated a certain number of vacation, compensation, sick and holiday hours for the firefighters, and after doing so failed to allot the appropriate amount of money for them to use those hours, Garringer said.
“You can’t have it both ways,” he said. “You gave them the time off, now put the money in there to pay us to take it off.”
Bruscia realizes his frankness concerning the fire department’s tactics won’t make him popular with firefighters and some of the public, he said.
“They’re American’s heroes. It’s political suicide,” he said. “While I’m not anxious to make enemies of the firefighters, I’ve got a job to do, and if they don’t like it, it’s too bad.”
Other than creating animosity between the department and city officials, the overtime feud creates tension between firefighters and the people they’re expected to protect, Martin Del Campo said.
“When we go to a call, the first thing the community’s going to say is, here comes the money-hoarding heathens,” he said. “We provide a service to the community, we expect to have a certain level of trust. When you compromise that, what does that do to us?”
