Shell Game Produces 400,000 Dollars For Battalion Chief Under the Guise of Cost-Savings

At last night’s city council meeting the discussion on reorganization of the fire department began with an announcement by City Manager Bill Emlen that this matter has taken on a new urgency as three top positions in the fire department, including the Fire Chief have gone vacant due to retirements.  For much of the rest of the night, City Manager Bill Emlen pushed the issue of the Battalion Chief Model forward arguing that it is a necessary change from a management standpoint that will enable more effective deployment than the current model allows.  He wrapped the conversation within the guise of cost-savings that would be exposed by the end of the evening as nothing more than a shell game.

However, that did not stop the council majority, a trio that has received tens of thousands in contributions from the fire fighters, at least twenty of whom were sitting in the audience to make their numbers and presence felt by the council, from voting by a narrow 3-2 margin to proceed looking into the reorganization.

During the budget discussions, as this article discusses shortly, it became clear there is no savings at all with this plan.  The positions that are proposed to be cut, have either been cut already or as we found out last night, are planned to be cut regardless.  Rather than saving the city $200,000, this will actually cost the city $400,000.  It is one of the most deceptive discussions I have seen at the city council level and the fact that three councilmembers bought into it, is an absolute travesty.

As Councilmember Heystek suggested in his closing remarks, this is less a reorganization than the adding of another layer of management to the department.

“We’re instituting another layer of management in the department, this is a misnomer, but it does nothing to talk about the core issues of crew size, 3 person vs. 4 person crews, does nothing to address the issue of response time, actually increases overtime, and it does not allow for a full exploration of a closer and more synergistic relationship with UC Davis.  I believe that when we institute this new layer of management without allowing a full investigation of the issues I have just outlined, we are not really engaging in a reorganization of the department.  I think again it amounts to a creation of a new layer of management.”

However, a lot of our questions that we posed prior to this meeting were addressed and in fact it would appear that things are actually worse than was believed previously.

One of the big issues that came from both the Grand Jury report and Citygate was the idea that the department would benefit from fresh blood so to speak.  It is difficult to sort out the intent of the city.  They will have an open process for hiring the new positions.  That is to some extent a formality.  One source has told me that the city is absolutely going to use this as a promotion opportunity while the finance director has consistently indicated that it is the intent of the City Manager to hire from outside of the department.  This is far from a small issue as it will go to the heart of who becomes the next fire chief.

Mayor Pro Tem Don Saylor’s question/ comment  exchange with Bill Emlen may have tipped the hand of where the city is coming from:

Saylor: “Since these Battalion Chiefs are going to be supervising citywide operations as well as areas outside the city that we cover, don’t you think that the key knowledge of those areas is a significant qualification?”

Emlen: “Absolutely.”

Saylor: “Could we achieve the savings that you have identified if we don’t hire people who currently work for the city?”

Emlen: “There are two ways that could happen.  One way is that you take a longer term approach and you phase this in through attrition—I think the Citygate reps talked about that as an option.  The other way which is obviously less desirable is that if in fact, you don’t fill those position from within, then you have to look at reducing the number of firefighters.”

Saylor: “So have you made a decision as to whether you will go to an open recruitment or an in-house recruitment?”

Emlen: “As indicated in the report, our intent is to do an open recruitment.  Our hunch is that our folks will compete quite well in that process.  There’s no guarantees.”

As Councilmember Heystek remarked during his final comments:

“I hear that it’s going to be an open recruitment process then I hear that we anticipate that these are going to be promotion opportunities.  What it sounds like to me is a case of musical chairs.”

The issue of cost-savings was blown out of the water.  Both Councilmembers Heystek and Greenwald noted that if the true goal of the city was cost savings, they could achieve a fuller savings without the Battalion Chief Model.

As Councilmember Sue Greenwald remarked:

“The use of the words during this presentation of cost-savings is deceptive, we have high and unsustainable costs written into our budget forecasts, when we decrease by a smidgen these high and unsustainable forecasts because of the cost of cutting back what Citygate calls a couple of redundant positions, and then substituting the higher paid positions, we’re calling this a savings.  Actually we need a significant cost savings, we’re not going to achieve this through increasing the rank and pay of four members of the force.”

She continued:

“When we ratchet back these unsustainable costs a little bit, I don’t call it a savings—I call it a smidgen less of a disaster.  I call it a euphemism for unsustainable expenditures.”

What is truly remarkable is the disconnect between this discussion and the later discussion by the Finance Director Paul Navazio where he acknowledged for the first time publicly that the city would like come up around $350,000 short in their projected savings from the employee bargaining discussions.  They drew up a list of $700,000 in cuts to programs because if cuts are needed, they will be midyear cuts and would only recognize half the savings that they would have had they occurred at the beginning of the year.  That is not stopping the city from apparently trying to implement the costly Battalion Chief Model under the guise of cost-savings.

But Councilmember Greenwald (as well as Mr. Heystek) saw through this canard:

“If we don’t need these back up firefighters, then we should eliminate them through attrition without raising the rank and pay for other firefighters on the force because we’re in extremely serious budget situation long term and we cannot afford to do this.”

She continued:

“I really think it is to the benefit of every public sector employee to help us maintain sustainable public sectors.  I’m going to be frank about this, at the direction we’re heading, we’re likely to see widespread local bankruptcies.  Under the bankruptcy scenario, all of the pension and benefits that the public sector employees have bargained so hard to achieve will be in jeopardy.  Public health and pension benefits can be stripped during bankruptcy.”

Councilmember Heystek pressed this point as well:

“We’re creating over $700,000 in new positions—never mind the other positions that manage when those positions are vacated—when the whole city is facing a hiring freeze and we may be looking at layoffs.”

He continued:

“I find it hard to talk about adding staff when we are asking voters to potentially re-up our sales tax measure, when we’re asking for other employees and the city as a whole to make sacrifices, I don’t know that it makes sense in this budgetary climate.”

In Tuesday’s article, we pointed out that the city was in essence double-counting the deletion of the Fire Division Chief for Prevention–a position cut back in June–by suggesting that it will off-set the cost of a future hire for the Assistant Fire Chief.

Councilmember Heystek called this disingenuous to call this a cost-savings plan.

“I think it is disingenuous to talk about a position that we deleted to balance our budget, not necessarily to facilitate the reorganization of the fire department.  If you take that position off the table, the elimination of the fire prevention division chief, and you talk about the cost of part-time temporary or however long that is, we actually see that with the creation of new management is going to cost us more not less.”

In fact, it is far worse than that.  The cost-savings is derived not from the switch to the Battalion Chief model–but rather the elimination of one of the reserve shift positions, reducing the amount of reserve firefighters on a given shift from three to two.  Theoretically, any need for personnel would be covered with roughly $100,000 in overtime, but it would produce a cost-savings.  At one point, even Bill Emlen questioned whether that would actually bring about savings.

But it gets worse because it turns out that one of the cost-savings contingencies is the elimination of two firefighter positions.  In other words, the city is already planning to remove the positions due to budget problems this year that they are claiming will make the Battalion Chief Model cost effective.  We find out about this not during the discussion on the Fire Department staffing but rather during the budget discussion.

This point was not lost on Councilmember Heystek who pressed the point.

Paul Navazio responded to the Councilmember:

“In reality, and this is a little bit of semantics, but any firefighter positions that would be reduced through the implementation of the new management structure, reorganization, would effectively move it from this category down to the citywide costs and efficiencies.  So, I guess we’re less concerned in terms what column we put it in, but we’re primarily concerned that we’re not double-counting savings in one area and putting them in another.”

But Mr. Navazio is missing the point here–or more likely avoiding it.  You cannot claim you are saving money when you are planning to cut the positions anyway regardless of whether or not the Battalion Chief model is being implemented.  This exposes the fact that the city is not undergoing any savings, and in fact Sue Greenwald is right, when you add in the cost of the new Assistant Chief and subtract the savings from the firefighter positions they are eliminating regardless, this plan costs the city $400,000.

Lamar Heystek responded to Mr. Navazio:

“If we’re going to say that we have just done saves us $200,000 and then we try to make that savings for general fund contingency, I think that amounts to double-counting.”

Bill Emlen also missed or avoided the point when he said, that if in fact we move forward with the reorganization of the fire department, we will change this list, if in fact that was approved.  Paul Navazio added that this might occur in other departments as well, that the savings in other restructurings might be pulled from this list as well.

The point is that the list and how it is accounted for is not the primary concern, it is creating the illusion that we are saving money by implementing this program when we have already eliminated the fire prevention chief and we are apparently now planning to eliminate two firefighter positions.

The Vanguard received an anonymous tip on Monday evening that foreshadowed the announcement that Chief Rose Conroy will retire.  Both Citygate and the Grand Jury made it clear that the department would benefit from hiring the next chief from outside of the department.  It appears now that the City Manager, Bill Emlen, has cut a deal with the fire chief that will ensure that the next chief as well as the Battalion Chiefs come from inside of the department and it will enable the Fire Chief, the Operations Chief, and the Business Manager, all of whom are retiring, to continue to run the department after their retirements and insure that this transition will be more of the same. same.

We will have more on this in the next week or so.  However, the big news from last night is that somehow the fire department has managed to get an additional $400,000 during a time when the city is trimming its budget to its bone for a Battalion Model that it has been seeking for years.  That is simply a remarkable situation.

—David M. Greenwald reporting