“If the City does not adjust spending, it would be facing bankruptcy in as little as 36 – 48 months.”

Click on my name for a link to the full text of the Fire Chief’s e-mail.

At the January 24th, 2009 Alameda Public Affairs Forum event covering the budget crisis, firefighters association president Dom Weaver said that he does NOT believe the city is close to bankruptcy. DVDs and audio CDS of that event are available from the APAF.

The City is in rough financial shape – it faces lawsuits totaling over $30 million from the Dr. Attari death in the estuary and the failure of the Telecom division of Alameda Power & Telecom. And I’m not convinced the City has suitable insurance coverage to pay off those settlements, should they arise. $30 million is roughly 40% of the annual general fund budget.

No one is saying that the work firefighters do is not brave and heroic and incredibly necessary, and no one is saying that they should not be well-compensated for their work. What I am saying is that public resources/taxpayer dollars are not at all infinite (in fact they are shrinking) and the choices the city makes in one area (health and welfare benefits for firefighters, for example, or staffing levels, for another) should not made in isolation.

We all should be asking questions about how the city can continue to provide the services it does more economically. For example, it might make sense to have a private company transport our patients to off-island hospitals once they have been treated by our firefighter paramedics (it is my understanding that 90 percent of transfers are off-island facilities). A structural change like this would 1. keep our firefighter-paramedics on the island so they’re here for the inevitable next emergency and 2. cost less because the ambulance company can provide the service for less than it costs the city to have our firefighter-paramedics do it.

Eve

The next time there is a fire I would like you to be the first responder to run in, and prevent loss of life or personal damage. While you are running in notice I would like you to notice every one else is running out for their lives. Firefighters deserve everything they get, and more. They not only put their lives on the line every time they respond to a fire, they also respond to getting your cat out of a tree-emergency medical calls. There jobs are not only to respond to fires they are also catch all to everything that goes on in a Town or City that is not specified in a job description in other operations of the city.