By Bruce Eggler
Times-Picayune (New Orleans)
Copyright 2006 The Times-Picayune Publishing Company
Defying New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin’s administration, a key City Council committee voted Thursday to give firefighters the same 10 percent raise that police officers are in line to get.
Besides the raise for police, Nagin had called for giving a raise only to first-year firefighters, saying the city could not afford to extend it to all fire personnel and pointing out that firefighters, unlike other municipal workers, get a state-mandated 2 percent annual pay increase starting in their third year on the job.
To the shock and delight of about 50 firefighters assembled in the council chamber, four of the seven council members voted for the departmentwide raise at a meeting of the council’s Budget Committee.
The full council is expected to follow suit at a meeting today, setting up the most direct conflict to date between Nagin and the new council that took office in June.
Asked for comment on the committee’s action, Nagin spokeswoman Ceeon Quiett said only that Nagin “has been consistent in stating that, as the city manages through its budget challenges recovering from the financial impact of Hurricane Katrina, he is open to ways that would allow the city to increase pay for” all its workers, specifically police and fire personnel.
Council members Arnie Fielkow, Stacy Head, Cynthia Hedge-Morrell and Cynthia Willard-Lewis stood one by one Thursday to show their support for a motion backing the 10 percent raise for firefighters and Emergency Medical Service workers.
Although the motion did not deal with where the city can find the money to pay for the raises, Nick Felton, president of Fire Fighters Association Local 632, said he was “so happy, I’m beside myself.”
His members, many of whom had walked in wearing paper Burger King crowns to dramatize their contention that fast-food workers in New Orleans are making higher hourly wages than starting firefighters, stood and cheered the news.
The council committee also called on the administration and the city’s Civil Service Commission to “immediately study and recommend to the council” a pay plan that would raise all city employees’ base pay “to match the Southern regional averages.”
The committee’s actions came just a day after the Civil Service Commission voted to approve Nagin’s proposal to raise police officers’ salaries by 10 percent and to boost rookie firefighters’ pay by about 25 percent, but took no action on veteran firefighters’ pay.
Although Felton, unlike most of his members, was aware beforehand of what the committee intended to do, he opened discussion of the issue with an angry speech accusing the Civil Service Commission and the Nagin administration of “economic capital punishment” and “placing New Orleanians at risk” by “causing our Fire Department to go away to nothing.”
On another pay issue, Head said the City Planning Commission, which was cut from 25 to nine staff members when the city laid off half its employees last fall after Hurricane Katrina, should immediately begin hiring three or four new planners.
Noting that the commission has a $48,000 surplus in its 2006 budget, Head said that is enough to pay three new planners through the end of the year and urged the administration to find another $15,000 or $20,000 to let it hire a fourth. She said the council will make sure the 2007 budget contains money to keep the planners on the job.
A group of prominent developers and business leaders appeared before the council several weeks ago to complain that the city’s recovery was being slowed because a lack of staff was preventing the Planning Commission from considering applications in a timely manner. The backlog is now several months.
The motion approved by the Budget Committee:
-- Directs the Civil Service Commission to “consider” extending the 10 percent raise it approved Wednesday for police to cover all firefighters, except new recruits, who will get about a 25 percent raise, and all EMS personnel. Hedge-Morrell, the Budget Committee’s chairwoman, said she would like to see firefighters get their raises at the same time as the police.
-- Asks the chief administrative office to figure out how much the additional raises would cost and how the city could pay for them. According to Felton’s association, a 10 percent raise for all firefighters would cost $688,000 for the final four months of 2006, or a little over $2 million for a full year.
-- Directs the Civil Service Commission and the chief administrative office to prepare a “future revised classified and unclassified pay plan” that would raise all workers’ pay to the Southern average. Such a plan likely would cost the city tens of millions of dollars a year.
Nagin last month announced plans to raise all police salaries by 10 percent and to boost the annual starting pay for rookie firefighters by $5,300 as a way to spur recruitment, but Felton said at the time that the raise would do nothing for firefighters already on the job. In fact, he said, under Nagin’s proposal, new recruits would earn more than some veteran firefighters.
The Civil Service Commission decided Wednesday to reduce the raise for fire recruits. Instead of $5,300, it approved an increase of $3,977, which would increase a rookie’s annual pay from $15,919, or $5.10 an hour, to $19,896, or $8.31 an hour.
Even with the bump in pay, fire union officials said, the starting salary for firefighters would still be less than fast-food restaurant workers can earn in New Orleans.