Commentary: This Was Not Council Responding to a Vocal Minority

The council cast their 3-2 vote on Tuesday, but it is clear that the war is not over on the issue of fire staffing.  In a piece co-authored by Alan Fernandes, Lori Duisenberg, Gina Nunes and Sean Cowan, “We value our firefighters” they write, “Every time we hear the wail of a siren, or jog past the fire station, or hear news of a local tragedy; we are thankful for our first responders, and in particular the firefighters in Davis.”

The reality is that no one thinks otherwise in this community.  The three councilmembers who cast the deciding votes on Tuesday all took time to praise the firefighters.  It was Councilmember Rochelle Swanson, however, who admonished the opposition that, just because people are not favoring the status quo does not mean they are anti-firefighter.

The line that I take most exception to is the third paragraph: “It makes little sense why three City Council members recently sided with a small, but vocal, number of people in our city who have chosen to second-guess our firefighters and devise their own plan for how Davis ought to be protected.”

This is a line that has emerged a number of times during the course of this debate.  The line insinuates that council was responding to the demands of a vocal minority of people.  That they somehow caved to pressure from this group.

I don’t believe that is what happened.  The city’s budget has been a problem for some time, and in June 2011, the Davis City Council by a 3-2 vote, voted to cut $2.5 million for employee compensation and put it toward unfunded liabilities and infrastructure.  That was contentious, and 150 city employees packed City Hall.

The firefighters only had a small contingent of their 36 employees on hand on Tuesday night, and few others showed up.  Clearly, the residents of the city were not angered by this proposal.  By contrast, when coyotes were shot last year, city chambers were packed.

Is it even a small minority?  One of the interesting things is that the firefighters attempted to organize and mobilize citizens to come down in support of their efforts to thwart the will of the majority.  And yet, at the March meeting maybe a dozen non-firefighters showed up.  At one point, the council and city had received 36 emails on the issue, 24 were in support of the status quo, but 12 were not.  There was never any organized effort to support Chief Kenley’s proposal.

I believe that a majority of citizens were actually in support of the proposal.  The numbers mobilized by the firefighters suggest that is the case.  Their facebook group, for instance, got just 42 likes as of this morning, which is smaller than the 53 likes that the Davis Citizens Against Fluoridation have and which pales to the 2300 likes that Mikey Partida’s support page got virally, without any organized effort whatsoever.

I think the citizens voted with their feet here and simply trusted the Davis City Council to do the right thing.

We have already responded to the notion that this was a move to “second-guess our firefighters,” noting that the plan was actually devised by former Interim Fire Chief Scott Kenley and Division Chief Shawn Kinney.

Mr. Kinney came up through the ranks and has faced considerable abuse from the rank and file for his willingness to put forward an alternative staffing model.  For his troubles, one of the former firefighters posting on the Vanguard made a very derogatory remark about him.

The piece continues, “Under the guise of saving approximately $400,000 a year, some city officials have decided we ought to shuffle our firefighters like a deck of cards, repositioning them with smaller crews and a diminished ability to save lives and property.”

As we have explained for weeks now, the plan makes a lot more sense.  First, it is clear that the central fire station is mislocated, now that we have boundary drop.

Second, it is clear that the current staffing arrangement of forcing an entire fire station to respond to every emergency is inefficient, and leaves huge parts of the city largely uncovered as we backfill the staffing at the central fire station and leave ourselves vulnerable to simultaneous calls.

While these citizens assert that this repositions the fire personnel “with smaller crews and a diminished ability to save lives and property” – that certainly is an open question.  It is true that a smaller crew may initially respond.  However, making up for that will be a faster response time (as we no longer rotate crews to the central fire station) and the eventual ability to utilize UCD resources and the rescue apparatus, which leaves us with larger numbers of personnel available.

“A few hundred thousand dollars is nothing to scoff at, of course, but it deserves to be put into perspective,” they write.  “What is the cost of saving a family’s home, or an apartment complex or a business from complete destruction? What is the cost of saving a life? Or, more coldly, what is the value of $400,000 in balancing the city’s annual budget?”

As Mayor Joe Krovoza put it, “$435,000 a year, year over year, in this budget is significant.”

But he also reminded everyone that, unlike every other bargaining unit in the city, the firefighters have not taken their fair share of the concessions that 70% of employees have taken.

The mayor would argue, “The compensation savings that the other units have provided to the city is extremely significant.  The savings that we have not gotten from the two units that we have not come to settlement with yet is harming us, putting us in a worse position.”

“Other programs in the city will be cut because we have not come to settlement with all of negotiating groups – fire and DCEA – that is simply the way it is,” he said.

The piece continues, arguing: “Our city’s fire stations are each staffed by four firefighters and now they will have only have three. Davis has three fire stations. There’s one downtown, one in South Davis, and one in West Davis. Each is staffed by four firefighters working 24-hour shifts. With that staffing level, our Fire Department covers an area of 133 square miles that experienced nearly 4,400 emergency calls last year.”

Except they are playing a bit fast and loose here.

First, they neglect to note that, actually, the central fire station will have five personnel.  They neglect to note that several hundred times a year, there is no one at the West Davis Fire Station or the East Davis Fire Station to respond to calls out there, since they have moved to the central fire station to backfill.

They neglect to note that boundary drop will mean there are actually four stations with 17 fire personnel, while we currently have 12.

So, when they continue: “As our city continues to grow, we need more firefighters, not fewer. Indeed, as our city has grown over the years, the city has not added additional firefighters or an additional station since 1985!”

They conveniently leave out the fact that we are not subtracting firefighters but actually, with boundary drop, adding to 17.

In fact, it may surprise you that the term “boundary drop” is never mentioned in the piece.  No, not once.  And that is actually the most significant change.

Right now, UC Davis has 6 firefighters who respond to about 900+ calls per year.  The city of Davis has 12 firefighters responding to 4200.  Under this configuration we would have 17 firefighters responding to about 5100 calls per year.

Under the current model, UC Davis cannot be the primary responder to an emergency in the city of Davis.  The immediate solution to periods of time where stations such as Station 33 were uncovered was to call in West Sacramento or Woodland to cover the station, but not UC Davis.

Station 34 was only contacted if outside agencies were not yet here, and other engines were tied up in a fire and couldn’t be redeployed.

Of course, this piece never mentions any of this.  Instead, they play on the emotions of the public.

Now we can, in the end, disagree on the optimal way to utilize our scarce resources, but this was a well-developed and well-thought-out plan.  To imply that this was simply council responding to a group of vocal critics is both disingenuous and insulting.

—David M. Greenwald reporting