Deja Vu: NHFD Over-Budget Overtime OK’d

Fire Chief John Alston came to the alders with a familiar plea: Firefighter overtime is well over budget, and — yet again — in desperate need of millions of dollars in life support.

Finance Committee alders signed off on Alston’s request for a $2.9 million transfer Monday night during their latest virtual committee meeting, held online via Zoom and YouTube Live.

The recommended approval now advances to the full Board of Alders for a final vote.

If approved by the full board, the requested transfer would redirect $1.9 million from the city budget’s Expenditure Reserves account and $1 million from the fire department’s salary account towards fire overtime.

According to the city’s November monthly financial report, the fire department is currently projecting a $3,331,000 deficit in fire overtime for the fiscal year that ends June 30.

It’s also projecting a $1,331,663 surplus in fire salary during that same time.

Déjà Vu All Over Again

Monday’s requested budget transfer and subsequent OK continued what has become an annual ritual of overtime-induced budget transfers.

For years, police and fire overtime have represented some of the most persistent overruns in the city budget.

For years, chiefs have warned that the amounts they’re given each year to pay for OT are not enough.

For years, City Hall officials have pledged to rein in public safety overtime as one of their most important fiscal priorities.

And for years, police and fire chiefs have returned to the Finance Committee to ask for multi-million-dollar transfers as their overtime accounts invariably drift towards the red.

After explaining just how uniquely challenging the past 10 months have been for his department — which has weathered a tropical storm, a significant snowfall, a spike in house fires, a spate of retirements, and a globe-spanning pandemic — Alston was blunt on Monday in his assessment of the fire overtime budget approved by the alders last July.

“$2.1 million is not enough to cover my overtime budget,” he said. ​“It never was.”

Dixwell Alder Jeannette Morrison and Westville Alder and Finance Committee Vice-Chair Adam Marchand engaged in a bit of legislative soul-searching as they urged their colleagues to back the requested transfer.

“The chief comes every single year and asks for a transfer,” Morrison said. ​“We know in doing the budget that he’s going to come back midyear and ask for a transfer. They’ve got to protect me and my constituents and the whole City of New Haven. Sometimes that costs. And we’ve got to be willing to pay the costs to make sure that we’re protected.”

“Making transfers throughout the year is a way of adjusting the approved budget to adapt to changing circumstances,” added Marchand. ​“Budget transfer requests are a reflection of changing circumstances, but they’re also a reflection of changing priorities and of changing thinking of the direction a department needs to go in.”

And East Rock Alder Anna Festa asked City Budget Director and city Acting Controller Michael Gormany if the city plans to change how it calculates a recommended fire overtime budget during the next fiscal year’s budget season, which is set to begin in March.

“Will we be more realistic than what we have been?” she asked.

“I think that’s one of the things that we’re looking at as we’re trying to get a more structurally sound budget,” Gormany replied. ​“The short answer is: ​‘Yes, we really should look at increasing the overtime so that we’re not here year over year.”

The problem is that there aren’t a lot of areas of the budget that can be cut, he said. ​“The city budget is really going up by fixed costs, not programs.”

He pledged to work with the mayor and the chief to propose an overtime budget that’s ​“reasonable for the fire department” this year, Gormany said.

But, he warned, ​“It’s sort of like a balancing act.”

A Uniquely Challenging Year

While fire department overtime projected deficits have become a fixture of midyear Finance Committee meetings, Alston said Monday night that the past 10 months have hit his department particularly hard — and have underscored just how courageous, difficult, and necessary are the services provided by the NHFD 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

“New Haven has a very unique system of emergency medical services, fire, and all-hazard response,” he said.

That system has been tested by Tropical Storm Isaias, for which the department provided ​“Make Safe” crews and had firefighters work to help neutralize live wires toppled by strong winds; by a December snow storm that — while not as disruptive as anticipated—nevertheless required firefighters to help staff the city’s emergency operations center, clear hydrants, and trudge through obstructed streets to be on call for emergency response; and by an increase in house fires that has resulted from more people spending time at home during the Covid-19 pandemic.

And then, of course, there’s the impact of the novel coronavirus itself.

Alston said that 305 firefighters have been placed off duty at some point since the pandemic began in mid-March. While only 38 of those 305 have tested positive for Covid-19, he said, the department has had to take extra precautions to separate those who have been exposed and not yet tested negative.

“When we’re responding, we’re responding in close quarters. We run the risk of community spread.” He said the department has had to be extra vigilant about keeping home firefighters who have been exposed to Covid because of the unavoidable close contact they have on a daily basis with fellow firefighters and vulnerable members of the public.

Alston said his department has also assigned firefighters and to the city’s Covid inspection task force to ensure that businesses are following the state’s and the city’s Covid safety guidelines.

And he said that the pandemic has so upended fire academy classes across the state that the department has not been able to seat a new class of recruits since the start of the pandemic.

That lack of an ability to refill the ranks combined with recent retirements and existing vacancies all contributed to the current projected OT overrun.

If the department is able to keep overtime at around $110,000 a week for the remainder of the fiscal year, that would mean $5.8 million spent on OT — well above the current $2.1 million budget.

“My goal is to make sure that we get below the $110,000 mark,” he said. ​“But with Covid, it is unpredictable. If I get an exposure, I have to shut it down.”

As for how to mitigate this year’s OT surge, Alson said the department recently brought on a new management and policy analyst who is helping with financial oversight and reports directly to the city’s budget director.

He said the department is slated to start testing a new software package next week that closely tracks OT and vacations by specification, classification, and skillset.

The department is promoting a new captain and arson supervisor next week, and is pressing human resources to provide the results as soon as possible from the lieutenant’s exam.

And the chief is exploring how to run some kind of ​“blended academy” in the months ahead, even as the pandemic persists.

Gormany said that his department, meanwhile, continues to work with the fire chief and every other area of city government to figure out which Covid-related expenses are eligible for reimbursement of up to 75 cents on the dollar by the Federal Emergency Management Association (FEMA). Those federal reimbursements, combined with a recently allocated pot of state money, may be able to cover some public safety overtime, depending on how strictly the reimbursement programs define Covid-related government expenditures.

Minimum Staffing MOU Still Stands

The alders did broach one long-standing structural fiscal concern with the fire department during an hour-long virtual public hearing hosted by the Public Safety Committee and the Finance Committee directly before the budget transfer meeting.

That hearing focused on a July 2019 memorandum of understanding (MOU) signed by former Mayor Toni Harp’s labor relations director and by former fire union president Frank Ricci.

The MOU, which was inked several months before the alders held hearings and signed off on a new fire union contract, included a provision that would drop the department’s minimum staffing levels from 72 to 69 if the city removed all of its paramedic-staffed Advanced Life Support (ALS) emergency medical units and redeployed some of the personnel to existing squads.

Click here for a previous article all about minimum staffing levels and their relationship to the fire department’s current structural deficit, and here for an article about that 2019 MOU.

Monday’s hourlong public hearing, however, provided little public conversation about the department’s rationale for settling on a minimum staffing level of 69 vs. 72 vs. any other number, and how the minimum staffing level relates to public safety and fiscal sustainability.

Instead, Alston explained that the minimum staffing level agreement was included in the MOU because ​“I wanted to try to get as much as I could for the city up front” while negotiating a host of other issues with the union, including setting up a then-new heavy rescue and dropping a paramedic stipend for ​“paramedics who weren’t doing the work.”

Alston said he wanted to get the minimum staffing number even lower than 69. But, ​“there was pushback. As much as I wanted to get it even lower, I couldn’t.”

City Corporation Counsel Patricia King and Labor Relations Director Cathleen Simpson both affirmed that, per the state’s Municipal Employee Relations Act (MERA), the city is almost certainly legally obligated to follow the terms of the MOU — even if the alders don’t like that it was inked by a previous administration and the fire union outside of the bounds of normal contract negotiations.

“Deals that were made like this, whether or not they were done in the best way, the best practice, we have to live with now,” said Simpson. ​“In my opinion, it would be a violation of MERA to now repudiate this agreement.”

The alders recently passed a law that requires the mayor to disclose any MOUs or other side agreements to aldermanic leadership within 36 hours of signing.