September 30 Deadline Looms As Council Goes On Vacation Starting Next Week

It seems like every year at this time, I point out the problematic nature of the council taking a month-long vacation.  And yet here we are, and after what will likely be a ceremonial meeting in August, the council will be off until September 6.

First of all, we do not have a city manager in place.  It was nearly a year ago, at the end of August, that Bill Emlen announced he was resigning in order to take a job in Solano County.  Nearly a year later we do not have a permanent City Manager.

Cost is certainly a consideration, but we are desperately in need of new blood and leadership from the city manager.  How that will eventually work its way out, is anyone’s guess.

There really is not urgency on the city manager hire.  The urgency is really the September 30 self-imposed deadline for finding $2.5 million in cuts.  That means that when the council next meets on September 6, there will be only 24 days to find that budget savings.

What happens if they cannot find the savings by that time?  That is an open question at this point.  One fallback, that I know they would not want to do, is to dip into the reserves until they can reach some sort of agreement.

We will thoroughly discuss the issue of moving from 4-person to 3-person fire crews later this week.  The interim city manager reportedly believes that such a move overall could save between $1 million and $1.5 million to the city.

The problem is, up to this point, the council has not formally received the report from CityGate.  They have not discussed the report.  They have not discussed moving from four persons to three persons on a fire crew.  We do not even know for certain that the report recommends it, although all indications are that it will.

And even if it does, this will be the issue the firefighters will go to the mat on.  The Vanguard, in anticipation of this issue coming forward, has spoken with Fire Chief Bill Weisgerber.

The fire chief clearly opposes the move, arguing, “The idea of going from 4-person to 3-person engine companies is seemingly a ‘cost-savings’ strategy.”

He continues, “However, the issue is more accurately one of a how many firefighters are needed to respond in time for both the rapid treatment of life-threatening medical emergencies (before permanent or fatal harm occurs) and the control and extinguishment of fires (at the earliest stages, before small fires become large).”

The question that Mr. Weisgerber believes is critical is how many personnel are needed on the scene of a residential structure fire within 11 minutes of a 9-1-1 activation?

He responds, “Firefighting forces of 15, plus a command officer are necessary to perform all the tasks vital in reducing the effects of fire on the structure and to the occupants. That equates to the first unit arriving at 4 minutes travel time, with multiple units by the 8th minute of travel.”

As I said, we will get into a fuller discussion on this later in the week.  As we would point out, the CityGate report from a few years ago argued that the five-minute response time is unrealistic and that really they need to be on the scene within 7 minutes.  Moreover, most of the city can get multiple station coverage within eight-minute response times.

Our examination, from a few years ago, showed roughly 85% of all stations have gone to three-men crews.  Mr. Weisgerber, however, argues that, “Davis’ fire stations are widely spaced apart. Multiple units are needed to deliver enough firefighters to serious emergencies, within a reasonable period of time, in order to effectively perform synchronized tasks for the necessary results.”

He adds, “A compounding issue in Davis is the high occurrence of simultaneous fire-related incidents-averaging an unusually high frequency of approximately 20% of the time.”

On the other hand, we have also seen that the number of fires in Davis is quite low, and as a result, we have personnel and equipment that is in most cases underutilized.

As you can see, this is going to be a very complex discussion.  Much of what Mr. Weisgerber states is not new, and in the end there will probably be a majority willing to reduce the number of firefighters per engine, but not without a fight and lengthy process.

Yesterday, councilmember Sue Greenwald argued, “My position was that I supported $2.5 million in budget cuts, but that it was problematic and perhaps counterproductive to insist on them by the end of this September, since our labor contracts expire next July.”

She continued, “I have to reiterate yet again that there is really no option except mass lay-offs when it comes to cutting $2.5 million in labor costs by the end of September.”

And that is what is at stake.  That gives us just over 60 days to get this done correctly, but, unfortunately, for more than half of that time, the council will not be working toward this goal, they’ll be working on their tans.

I do not begrudge them the time off – they need it and they can probably be more effective with it than not taking it.  However, we are trying to convince employees that this is a crisis, that it is not business as usual.  How do we do that when the council takes a vacation up until 24 days before the deadline?

I have stated this before, but Sue Greenwald is probably correct that the employees will not take concessions prior to September 30.  However, characterizing the 20 to 30 people laid off as “massive” is not helpful.  Far more people have been laid off by the school district and in other jurisdictions.

While I still hold out hope that the management will ultimately become wise and take a ten-percent pay cut, I think more practically for this round we are more realistically looking at the following scenarios: (1) reorganization, (2) prioritization of city services, (3) reduction of fire personnel per engine.

Everyone seems to acknowledge that city government is inefficient, that we have services that we provide that we do not need to be providing, and yet we want the number of people laid off to be zero.

Part of making structural changes is making government more efficient, and sometimes that means people lose their jobs.  I do not want to be lighthearted or callous about this, but we have gotten ourselves into this trouble because we have been afraid to make these kinds of changes.

Moreover, as the DCEA (Davis City Employee’s Association) situation demonstrates, even within the context of collective bargaining it is going to take a long time to deal with the kinds of structural change that we want.

The clock is ticking in more ways than one.  Costs are going to rise over the next four or five years.  How much, we do not know, but we must prepare for the worst.  We must be ready to find as much as $7 million in cost savings in the next three years, while assuming zero growth both in sales and property taxes.

—David M. Greenwald reporting