8th District Report
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| Pat McOsker |
The long and painful budget fight is over. The outcome has been decided.
On July 5, in accordance with the 2011/2012 adopted LAFD budget, the LAFD will suffer the "hard-closure" of as many as 18 fire companies and four rescue ambulances.
I refuse to call these closures permanent and I say "as many as" because the City Council passed amendments to the Mayor's budget meaning there is a plan to someday restore these resources, and there is hope that the first round of restorations could occur prior to July 5th. Had we not fought the mayor and his fire chief on their permanent downsizing plan, neither possibility would exist.
The pending changes to the LAFD - the reduction of staff at so many firehouses, the calculated, delayed responses to so many neighborhoods, and the assignment of so many UFLAC members in staffing pools - will all be painful and dangerous. We are being forced to operate understaffed and under-supported while protecting America's second largest and most firefighter challenging city.
The minute that we became aware of the Chief's intention to offer permanent closures in exchange for temporary, rotating closures, we discussed our options. We concluded that neither plan was safe. If there was any doubt in our minds that management's priorities were upside down, it was completely erased when - on the very same day that the Fire Chief made his hard-closure plan public - he stood before the Council's Personnel Committee fighting for permission to hire nine civilian investigators for an expansion of PSD. He made it abundantly clear that he was for the permanent elimination of 318 first-responder positions and the addition of civilian staff to harass what was left of us.
We decided right then to ramp up the fight to get our resources back. We revived our public awareness campaign, sending mail into fire station districts slated for hard closures. We held rallies and press conferences in communities and at City Hall. We were there in numbers and T-shirts for every City Hall vote and discussion of the issue. We spoke honestly and bluntly to the people of LA through the press. We talked about safe staffing, delayed responses and the mayor's upside-down priorities. We pushed back against the LAFD management team doing the mayor's bidding.
In the end, we just couldn't muster enough votes on the Council to stop the fire chief's closures. Thankfully, the Council President Eric Garcetti worked out a compromise.
Garcetti introduced two amending motions to the mayor's LAFD budget plan. The first authorized all current LAFD field positions for 2011/2012, including those which the mayor had cut the funding for. That amendment makes it easier to bring staffing back when money materializes. The second was an acknowledgment that the Fire Department is the Council's highest priority for restoration when revenue returns. It created a special "Restoration of Neighborhood Fire Services" account, and said that any new revenue or savings attained through negotiations or other means would go into the account to be used for resource reopenings, the order of which will be determined by the Fire Chief on the basis of need. Both motions passed unanimously.
While it's clearly not the victory that we wanted, the amended budget is better than the alternative that we almost got. Just days after the Council's vote on our spending plan, I was back in their chamber, speaking against the Fire Chief's hoped-for expansion of PSD. In the end, the Council did the right thing by choosing to put the savings into the new account instead.
The next likely source of funding for our service restoration account is savings gained from us through contract negotiations. We are after all, at the bargaining table trying to work out a deal. So are our brother and sisters on the LAPD. The City clearly expects both of us to make yet another sacrifice, and it would seem that they fully intend to get 2% from us to help pay for the medical subsidies that we will all get in retirement. If they don't get our help voluntarily, you can bet that they will try to take more than 2% of our pay - of pensionable pay - by imposing a contract with takeaways. They've also made it clear that they would try to freeze subsidies for future retirees (you and me) at the current level for the rest of our lives.
As I have said many times before, the only solution to our seemingly constant struggles is to have the votes on City Council when we need them. Everything we do and everything we care about as union firefighters comes down to politics. If the fiscal crisis that we've been through the past few years has taught us anything, it has taught us that we should double down on political action.
The changes brought about by the Mayor's new deployment plan will be painful and dangerous. UFLAC leaders will do everything in our power to achieve, through negotiations, the most fair and favorable working conditions possible for pool assigned firefighters and all union members. We only hope that management will work with us to achieve that goal. We also won't stop fighting until every last resource is reopened someday.