Panel Votes To Cut Number Of Fire Supervisors

A plan to reduce the number of fire lieutenants from 50 to 40 moved forward while the city and the union clashed over whether the move will save needed money or exacerbate diversity and overtime problems.

Both sides made their case to the Board of Alders Finance Committee Wednesday night. The city won this round, with the committee voting unanimously to approve the plan. The union still has a shot at convincing the rest of the alders before they take a final vote on the cuts at the next full board meeting.

Chief Administrative Officer Michael Carter (pictured) asked the Finance Committee to approve eliminating 10 vacant fire lieutenant positions in the fiscal 2014 – 2015 budget. He said the positions aren’t needed to meet the operational needs of the department. Carter said an analysis of budgets from the last decade shows historically that the department has never used 50 fire lieutenant positions.

Fire Department leadership agreed that 40 fire lieutenant positions would be enough to ensure the city’s safety requirements are met without violating the bargaining agreement with firefighters union Local 825 for minimum manning requirements. The department currently has 36 filled lieutenant positions. Fire lieutenants receive salaries of $79,574 each. Eliminating 10 positions would reduce the budget by $795,740.

Union President Jimmy Kottage said there are better ways to help the city find cost savings than reducing the number of vacant positions just before people are schedule to test for lieutenant and captain.

“In theory it sounds appealing,” he said, of the cost savings. ​“But the department has proven itself, for the last 50 years, incapable of holding regular promotion exams.”

The failure to promote regularly has resulted in a department with no captains and lieutenants doing the work of captains and amassing tons of overtime, Kottage said. He said it doesn’t make sense to reduce the positions with new classes of recruits starting in firehouses next year and another class scheduled to start in early January.

Union Vice-President Frank Ricci said cutting the positions means that 10 people taking the promotion exam for lieutenant in the next month or two likely won’t be promoted.

“I believe in individual merit,” Ricci said. ​“It matters that you can rise and succeed. But if you look at testing in New Haven … through a statistical lens, the chance of those 10 positions being white is very rare.” Black and Latino firefighters have not tested as well as their white counterparts on promotion exams.

Both Kottage and Ricci are lieutenants who intend to test for captain. They said the 10 positions would allow for flexibility within the ranks for more experienced lieutenants to mentor the new lieutenants, who will be thrust into making life-and-death decisions soon after promotion.

Ricci said it isn’t feasible to expect captains to do such mentoring because not every company is large enough to require a captain. He also pointed out that his class anniversary is coming up and every officer is eligible for retirement in the next few years.

“Poor planning has to stop,” he said. ​“We need to prepare for these retirements.”

The committee agreed that the fire department needs to do more planning and promotions need to happen in a more regular manner. They were less convinced that reducing the number of lieutenant positions would hurt their greatest concern — safety of residents.

Board President Jorge Perez said a sticking point for him is a clause in the union contract that would require the department to fill the vacant positions if it had an active list. Once the the promotion exam for lieutenant is given, the department would have to fill all those positions whether it needed that many supervisors or not.

He also pushed back against the idea that a reduced number of lieutenant positions would hurt the promotions of blacks and Latinos in the department, and expressed disbelief that many of the officers eligible for retirement at 20 years would exercise that option. He said unlike in the police department, people retire later in the fire department.

East Rock Alder Jessica Holmes said if diversity is a concern, she would like to look at how to increase training and education to help people score better on promotion exams.

Dixwell Alder Jeanette Morrison said she supports making the cut because she knows the union won’t hesitate to come back for those positions if the cuts become unmanageable.

“The union is not shy,” she said. ​“If they find they need more, they will be back. If diversity is a problem, you know that the Firebirds and the Latino Society would be down here before the union got here because they have no problem, as they say, telling us what we don’t know.”