Fixing The Budget: Fire Choices

Cutting four firefighter positions and merging medical and fire response units could save New Haven over $1.7 million each year.

In the view of the fire union, it could also mean fewer firefighters available to respond to the next serious blaze.

Cutting an engine company could also save the city over $1.7 million each year in personnel costs. But neither management nor the union is considering that idea, fearing that a closed engine would increase average emergency response times by over a minute.

Those are among the tough choices New Haven faces in deciding how to rethink how it runs its government, or else succumb to a state takeover of its finances, choices the Independent is asking readers to explore and weigh in on as part of New Haven’s quest to get its fiscal house in order.

As the city grapples with an estimated $30 million structural deficit and two recent credit downgrades that resulted, in part, from years of overly optimistic budgeting, observers have identified the fire department as one area to examine for cost-saving restructuring.

One potential model for how to approach the restructuring could lie in an early 1990s study by now retired Yale business school professor Art Swersey. Swersey devised a controversial plan to reduce firefighter personnel in favor of cross-trained firefighter-medics as a means of cutting costs and tilting the department away from fire suppression and more towards emergency medical response.

New Haven adopted the plan at the time, and then quickly dropped it. But Swersey’s ideas continued to be debated not just here, but nationwide.

Read on to see how we got to this point in the fire budget — and let us know how you would weigh the pros and cons to make the tough decisions.

Fire Department Snapshot

At $33.2 million, the Fire Department’s budget makes up 6 percent of the city’s overall general fund budget for the current fiscal year. That’s the third highest budget of any city department, after the school system (which is overseen by the Board of Education but receives nearly two-thirds of its annual funding from the city) and the Police Department.

Last year, the Fire Department exceeded its $31.4 million budget by nearly $5 million. Overtime, salary, and retirement buyouts were the three key drivers of the department’s deficit.

The department’s general fund budget includes 366 full-time personnel, 347 of whom are assigned to fire suppression and emergency medical services (EMS). The fire suppression personnel include positions for 270 firefighter/EMTs, 25 captains, 40 lieutenants, eight battalion chiefs, and four deputy chiefs.

According to Fire Chief John Alston, the department currently has 356 full-time employees.

The most recent union contract, which expired at the end of June, requires 72 firefighters to be on duty at all times. The contract also stipulates that a firefighter’s average work week should be 42 hours.

That means the department employs four or five firefighters for every position that needs to be filled at any given moment to meet the minimum staffing requirement.

The city mandates that all New Haven firefighters be trained as Emergency Medical Technicians (EMTs) in Basic Life Support (BLS). That means that, in the case of a medical emergency, any New Haven firefighter can provide a baseline of medical care, including airway maintenance, CPR, and Narcan, until a paramedic trained in Advanced Life Support (ALS) gets to the scene.

According to Kenneth Oliver, Jr., the department’s EMS supervisor, 38 of the city’s 356 full-time employees are certified paramedics.

Across the city’s ten fire stations, the department runs 10 fire engine companies, four fire truck companies, two special rescue squads, and only two emergency medical units with ALS equipment.

The engines, trucks, and rescue squads must be manned by a minimum of four firefighter/EMTs when they respond to a call. The emergency medical units are manned by one paramedic and one firefighter/EMT each.

Each of the 270 firefighter/EMT positions has a line item salary of $76,496 in the budget. But, as independent Financial Review and Audit Commission (FRAC) Chair Mohit Agrawal points out, the city budget has separate line items for salary and fringe benefits, such as pensions, medical care, and workers’ compensation. He said the average fringe benefits for a city firefighter likely add another 40 to 50 percent to the cost of each position’s salary.

That puts the average cost of a firefighter/EMT position closer to $107,00, conservatively speaking.

Even though every firefighter is capable of providing BLS and the city’s paramedics can provide ALS, none of the city Fire Department vehicles can transport people experiencing medical emergencies to the hospital.

The city contracts that work out to the private ambulance company American Medical Response (AMR) to the tune of $100,000 each year. The city can then receive reimbursements from AMR if city-employed paramedics make the trip to the hospital with the person being transported.

A Changing Profession

Meanwhile, the nature of firefighter work is changing, and has been changing for the past four decades.

Firefighters respond much more frequently to emergency medical calls than they do to fire suppression calls.

In Fiscal Year 2016 – 2017 (FY17), New Haven firefighters responded to over 25,512 incidents in total, according to the department’s budget narrative in the most recent budget.

Eighty percent of those calls were medical. Only 18 percent of those calls were for fire incidents. Of those fire incidents, only 1 percent were for arson.

According to the U.S. Fire Administration, 64 percent of calls to fire departments nationwide in 2014 required EMS response. Only 5 percent of calls required fire suppression.

Firefighters union President Frank Ricci told the Independent that simply claiming that firefighters respond to more medical calls than they do to fire suppression calls perpetuates a ​“false narrative.” He said fires may be less frequent now than they were 40 years ago, but they are more intense, take place in more confined spaces, and are more dangerous for firefighters to respond to.

Plus, he said, the category of ​“medical response” includes a broad range of incidents, including automobile accidents, cliff rescues, and boat accidents.

“Emergency medicine happens to run more calls than any fire calls,” he said. ​“But they’re two distinctly different things, and they shouldn’t be compared together.”

Back in the early 1990s, a Yale business school professor and former RAND Institute researcher named Arthur Swersey did just that.

Asked by then-city Chief Administrative Officer (CAO) Douglas Rae and then-Fire Chief Earl Geyer, Jr. to investigate which fire engine company to shutter in response to the city’s then-fiscal crisis, Swersey instead delivered a different recommendation.

He argued that the department could save $1.4 million a year and even improve public safety by cutting four firefighter positions and creating two fire/medic units that were cross-trained to respond to both fire suppression calls and to ALS-necessary emergency medical calls.

An amended version of the controversial plan was adopted for only a year before it was dropped.

From Swersey’s perspective, the plan failed because it lost political support and succumbed to union pressure.

From Ricci’s perspective, the plan failed because it needlessly endangered city firefighters and residents by rendering certain engine companies unusable whenever their corresponding medical teams were out on call.

Today’s firefighter/EMTs are better trained to respond to medical emergencies than were the city’s non-medical firefighters in the early 1990s.

The Independent spoke with Swersey, Ricci, and Alston to see if there are any takeaways from the Swersey Plan of 1991 that might help the New Haven Fire Department of 2018 cut costs and maintain public safety. We also spoke with former city CAO Rob Smuts, who undertook his own efforts back in 2010 to transfer four firefighter positions from an existing engine company into two new ALS units.

Because of ongoing contract negotiations with Local 825, the fire chief declined to go into detail in response to questions about if and how the department needs to be restructured to fit the rising tide of medical calls.

He did say that he is keeping a close eye on the department’s paramedics program.

“It’s being evaluated for efficiency,” Alston said. ​“We’re concerned about the increase in calls related to the opioid epidemic and the use of K2 as an illicit drug. Medical calls are up, and some of the principal indicators of productivity and quality service to the citizens of New Haven all revolve around our fire-based EMS program.”

The Swersey Plan: $1.7M In Savings?

Art Swersey retired this year after spending over three decades teaching at the Yale School of Management, where he specialized in quality management and operations management.

A Bronx native with a mass of white hair, Swersey is an approachable academic, seemingly beloved by his students. During an interview this week at the business school’s café, a student walked up to Swersey, put his hand on the professor’s shoulder, and joked with him for a few minutes about a recent campus event.

Those trends are true across the country.From 1990 through 1992, the last time New Haven faced a near fiscal crisis leading to a reexamination of how city government functions, Swersey studied New Haven’s Fire Department intensively. He wound up giving his name to a plan that still triggers a few automatic negative reactions amongst firefighters like Ricci.

Swersey argued that the model he helped come up with in the early 1990s is worth reinvestigating today. Plus, he said, it’s been working out well for the St. Paul, Minn., fire department, about which he is currently writing a research paper.

In short, Swersey’s research led him to believe that the city’s fire department could pool together two of the department’s two-person medical response units with two of the department’s four-person fire engine companies.

This would allow four people to do the work that six had previously been doing, since two cross-trained fire-medics would attend to medical calls per usual, and would join two firefighters to fill out the four required to staff an engine company during fire suppression calls.

This pooling effect would allow the department to cut four firefighter positions, Swersey said: two positions each from the engine companies joining up with the medical units.

That in turn would allow the department to cut 16 individual firefighters from the payroll, since round-the-clock minimum staffing requirements obliges the department to employ four firefighters for every requisite position.

Click here to read an article that Swersey published in 1993 that recounts in detail the rationale, history, and implementation of the plan.

The staffing cuts, Swersey said, could be achieved because fire engines were only busy 2 or 3 percent of the time, and emergency medical units were busy only 15 percent of the time.

If the city created two joint fire-medical units, then the risk of having a fire engine out of commission (because two of the four required personnel were away on a medical call) was only 30 percent.

That’s much better, he said, than the alternative originally presented by the city, which was to shut down a four-person engine company entirely.

“You close a fire station,” Swersey told the Independent, ​“people come out with picket signs. You create one of these joint units, it doesn’t have the same political impact.”

Furthermore, he said, the quality of the service is hardly affected because of the relative rarity of fire suppression calls and the increasing prevalence of medical calls.

“It’s basically the labor cost of operating an engine company if you create two of” the joint fire-medical units, Swersey said.

The plan that was ultimately adopted by Rae, Geyer, and the department involved combining two medical units with two engine companies, but allowing certain engine companies to respond to fire suppression calls with three personnel rather than four. That way, no engines had to be ​“browned out” when their fires-medics were out on medical calls.

Swersey said that the program was in place for about a year in 1991 and 1992, but lost its political support when Rae left his position as CAO. The subsequent city administrator was more sympathetic to the fire union, which wanted to reverse the personnel cuts.

“It seems like the door is open,” Swersey said about adopting something like his original plan today. ​“I wouldn’t call it low-hanging fruit necessarily, but it is hanging there.”

He said the city should look into combining its two existing emergency medical units with the engine companies that those ambulances share a station with.

That would mean merging the paramedic personnel from Emergency Unit 1 with firefighter personnel on Engine 5 at the Woodward Avenue station, and merging the paramedic personnel from Emergency Unit 2 with firefighter personnel on Engine 11 at the Howard Avenue station.

If the city created such joint fire-medical units, it could eliminate four positions, and therefore 16 individual staffers. If each firefighter costs on average around $107,000 in salary and benefits, those 16 positions add up to over $1.7 million in personnel savings each year.

Swersey recommended that the city this time around offer firefighters higher salaries as a way to get union buy-in for the proposed cutting of personnel in favor of creating joint fire-medic units.

Union: A Non-Starter

Firefighters union President Ricci and union Vice-President Mark Vendetto said they see nothing to be gained from looking back at the fire-medic restructuring model that Swersey first proposed almost 30 years ago.

“The Swersey Plan wasn’t just one little aspect,” Ricci said during an interview in the union’s second-floor office at 350 James St. ​“It was a comprehensive plan. And the plan failed on all levels.”

He said the plan had firefighters moving from one apparatus to another, and going to fight fires with fewer personnel than were necessary. He said that the three-man engine company didn’t work for the city’s Fire Department and that it needlessly put firefighters’ and residents’ lives at risk.

Furthermore, Vendetto said, all city firefighters are now trained in basic emergency medical response, whereas paramedics were the only medical experts in the department back in the early 1990s.

As for staffing engine companies with paramedics, Ricci said that idea has been around since before the early 1990s.

He said that model of having paramedics riding in the same trucks as firefighters has become increasingly prevalent outside of Connecticut. New Haven firefighters would be open to adopting that model here if management invests enough in the right training, equipment, vehicles, and staff, he said.

“The union’s position is that the city doesn’t manage the paramedic program appropriately,” he said. ​“It doesn’t hire enough paramedics or send our members for training that are active to paramedic school.”

As for proposed personnel cuts, Ricci said, absolutely not. Even in times of fiscal crisis, he said, the department should not be cutting public safety personnel.

“We don’t cut back on the heat in winter,” he said. ​“The Fire Department provides an essential service to the citizens of New Haven.”

An Earlier Attempt To Add More Paramedics

Back in 2010, then-city CAO Rob Smuts tried shifting the department’s structure a bit more towards medical response than fire suppression, but without cutting any personnel.

Now the director of San Francisco’s 9 – 1‑1 service, Smuts told the Independent Friday about a plan he had to increase the New Haven department’s number of paramedics during the middle of his seven-year stint as then-Mayor John DeStefano’s CAO, a position that oversees fire, among other departments.

Smuts said he and the mayor and the Fire Department were in frequent conversation about replacing an existing engine with two ALS-capable transport units. That would mean transferring four firefighter positions dedicated to an engine to two new medical response units, each to be staffed by two paramedics.

The problem, he said, was that the city didn’t have enough paramedics to make the program work. The city wasn’t able to train, hire, or recruit enough paramedics to work the two new medical units.

“It took us longer to train additional paramedic firefighters than anticipated,” he said. He said at the time the department had around 12 paramedics on staff, and that they were stretched thin across the two existing medical units as it was.

“The minimum staffing provision is in the contract,” Smuts said. So any reduction to personnel would have to be accomplished through negotiations with the union. At the time, he said, the administration’s cost-cutting focus was on pension and medical costs. The plan to install two new ALS units was instead about beefing up the department’s medical response infrastructure.

But the department’s internal structure remained the same: No engines were cut. The two new medical units were never added.

Shuttering Engine 8? Not Likely

Also in the early ​‘90s, the Daniels administration floated the idea of closing a fire station to cut costs. Political opposition killed the plan.

Both Fire Chief Alston and union President Ricci agreed that the department should not shut down Engine 8 at the Whitney Avenue fire station, which was closed for several weeks after a March 23 fire.

Alston said he analyzed the department’s citywide response times for both fire and medical calls during the period that Engine 8 was out of commission. He said the four-minute average response time went up by about a minute, even though Engines 4, 6, and 10 are each stationed a little over a mile from Whitney Avenue.

He said he is not looking into closing down Engine 8 because of that measurable impact it would have on firefighter response times.

“It’s not a worst-case scenario to us,” Ricci said about the prospect of shutting down an engine company to save city dollars. ​“It’s a worst-case scenario to the individual who calls 9 – 1‑1 when their child’s having an asthma attack, their home or business is on fire, or their loved one is in a car accident. The fact is: every neighborhood deserves a neighborhood fire engine. When times get tough, you don’t cut back essential services that affect public safety.”

More Firefighters Than Other Cities

FRAC’s Agrawal said, from a citywide budgetary perspective, he is most interested not in how the department allocates its personnel, but in how the department’s total workforce and minimum staffing requirements compare to those of other similarly-sized cities in Connecticut and elsewhere in the Northeast.

“Big picture,” he said, ​“what do other cities do on numbers?”

According to a 2016 study by the National Fire Protection Association, between 2013 and 2015, cities in the Northeast with between 25,000 and 249,000 people and with firefighters working between 40 and 45 hours per week averaged 2.06 firefighters per 1,000 population.

Since New Haven has around 131,000 people and 347 budgeted fire suppression and EMT personnel, then the city has closer to 2.65 firefighters per 1,000 population. That is about 25 percent higher than the average found by the National Fire Protection Association.

Bridgeport, a city of nearly 146,000 people, has 308 firefighters on staff, or closer to 2.10 firefighters per 1,000 population. Bridgeport’s department has a minimum staffing requirement of 62. Stamford has nearly 130,000 people and 238 employees, or closer to 1.83 firefighters per 1,000 population. Stamford’s department has a minimum staffing requirement of 60.

Ricci said the New Haven population figures don’t include undocumented immigrants or many college students. He added that New Haven’s FD is also the only one in the state ​“that provides the level of medical service for BLS and ALS.”

Click on the links below to read other stories about the city’s structural deficit and ideas for closing it.

• Hey, Buddy, Can You Spare $30 Million?
• S&P Downgrades City Credit Rating
• City Will Refinance Debt To Avoid Takeover
• City Ends Policy As It Begins To Pay Off
• Mayor Open To Idea Of Fewer Top Cops