What the deputy mayor said wasn’t true.
When he said at a Monday evening community forum on the new “dynamic staffing” policy at the Rochester Fire Department that the move was necessitated by the abuse of sick leave, he was wrong.
And a recent internal analysis at City Hall proves it.
“Dynamic staffing” is a policy in which the city closes down a fire house most evenings, shifting its firefighters to round out crews elsewhere. It’s a brown out of neighborhoodfirehouses, and it has been condemned by firefighters and community members alike.
And last night the deputy mayor blamed the members of the Rochester Fire Department.
It was a slander.
Because it’s not sick leave that drives overtime, it’s staff shortages. And that’s not an opinion, that’s the conclusion of a just-completed City Hall study of the matter.
A summer intern at City Hall – an RIT statistician – was asked to analyze various city data, including fire department overtime. She determined that less than 2% of fire departmentovertime came as the result of firefighters calling in sick. Instead, her analysis showed that 94% of fire department overtime came from the fact the city doesn’t employ enough firefighters.
It’s not sick leave, it’s staffing.
And City Hall is in charge of that.
And that can be a good policy or a bad policy, depending on a city’s interests and financial situation. Some municipalities in this situation would choose to hire more firefighters,and others would choose to pay the overtime. And either could be right or wrong, based on the specific circumstance.
It’s not necessarily a bad thing that the city of Rochester pays so much overtime – if that is a more financially expedient or affordable option than hiring more firefighters.
But it is a bad thing to damage the public reputation of some of the city’s most-respected employees by making a false accusation against them.
Rochester firefighters don’t abuse the sick leave policy. In fact, the department has been honored repeatedly for having the lowest absentee rate of all city employees. And ifthere is an abuse of the policy, fire department regulations exist to punish the violator and correct his future conduct.
It was reckless at best for the deputy mayor to seek to alienate the community from the fire department. In a city that seems fixated on police-community relations, it shouldbe remembered that trust and admiration are at the heart of fire-community relations. That trust and admiration shouldn’t be jeopardized by inaccuracies out of City Hall.
Especially if the entire thing is just a union-busting effort.
The president of the firefighters union has told his membership that the city offered to eliminate “dynamic staffing” if the union would capitulate on one or two money issuesin the current contract.
The whole thing, with all the community upset and uncertainty, may just be a ploy to pressure a concession out of the union.
Which is no good.
Because this only inconveniences firefighters – it endangers the community. The assertion that response time is not increased by the idling of a fire station is preposterous.Real life teaches that that is not true.
The worst part of all this is that it is completely unnecessary.
The men and women of the Rochester Fire Department are City Hall’s best ambassadors. They are positive can-do heroes who in large measure do their jobs because they genuinelylove the department, the city and its people.
There is no natural enmity between the mayor and her fire department, and this issue should not be pushed to create hard feelings. The mayor has a good and well-admired chief,and before this issue arose morale was honestly pretty good.
But nobody wants to be lied about.
And nobody wants to be undermanned when lives are on the line.
And that’s where Rochester firefighters believe they are – their mayor is sticking it to them, and her administration is using falsehoods to justify it.