By Evy Lewis
Daily Southtown
HARVEY, Ill. — Four more firefighters from the Harvey Fire Department were laid off last week, further reducing a department that was already been operating at half strength following sweeping reductions to city staff in October.
Before the city announced a financial emergency and began mass layoffs, the Fire Department had 37 staff, said Keith Freeman, secretary of Harvey Firemen’s Association Local 471. Now, they’re down to just 15, and have gone from three active fire stations to just one.
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“This is very potentially going to cost injury or the lives of the citizens,” Freeman said. “The manpower that we have in the city, we agreed upon because it’s the required manpower to do the best we can for the citizens, to keep the citizens safe. That’s our top priority.”
Normally, Freeman said, the Fire Department should have a minimum of seven firefighters on duty and ready to respond at a given time. Now, they’re down to three on most shifts.
“That’s like trying to play football with less than half your team. You’re just going to get creamed,” Freeman said. “The biggest concern the union has is for the citizens, because we don’t have the resources right now that we need to serve them the way we are supposed to.”
The layoffs have meant Harvey firefighters have responded to structure fires with well fewer staff than needed to do their jobs in the safest way for both themselves and for the city’s residents, he said.
“Members have been required to do things that are extremely dangerous for themselves, and make it extremely dangerous for the citizens,” Freeman said.
Four staff members were also laid off from the Police Department and the Public Works Department in the latest round, a city spokesperson confirmed.
“Because of long-standing financial problems inherited from previous administrations, the City of Harvey has been forced to implement additional layoffs despite our best efforts to prevent them,” Mayor Christopher Clark said in a statement relayed through a spokesperson. “We urgently need the federal government, state and county to step in and help stabilize the city’s finances so we can protect essential services for our residents.”
Harvey’s City Council voted unanimously in October to apply for designation as a financially distressed city, which would allow the city to receive state financial relief and oversight under the Illinois Financially Distressed City Law.
At the time, Clark also drew attention to Illinois House Bill 4024 as an option for emergency financial relief for Harvey, which would have approved the appropriation of $30 million from the state’s general revenue fund to pay for Harvey’s operational expense. However, the legislature’s veto session ended without movement on the bill.
Initially, the city framed the reductions in city staff as temporary furloughs. Now, they are more clearly being framed as layoffs.
“The city has really not given us any indication of when this is going to end, how hard it’s going to get, how bad it’s going to get, or when they might start bringing the membership back,” Freeman said.
The layoffs have come at a particularly dangerous time for fire threat, as structure fires are more common during winter. Between 2019 and 2023, 46% of home structure fires and 53% of home structure fire deaths occurred in the five-month span from November to March, according to research by the National Fire Protection Association.
“The city of Harvey catches a lot more structure fires than most places,” Freeman said. “Since the layoffs we’ve had, I think it’s like a structure fire every week.”
That’s partly due to Harvey’s hundreds of abandoned buildings, especially in the winter months when people are more likely to squat in unmaintained buildings for shelter, he said.
Firefighters are working with no leave, Freeman said, and if someone calls in sick there could be as few as two firefighters on shift.
“We all raised our right hand and made a promise that we would help the citizens when they called, and we’re still going to keep doing that,” Freeman said. “We just went from having enough guys to do the best we can with our normal minimum, to not quite having enough, and now we really don’t have enough at all.”
After the initial layoffs, Clark said emergency services in Harvey would be able to stay responsive even with the staff reductions, partially due to support from the fire departments of surrounding communities.
Freeman said while it’s true that surrounding communities like Dolton do send their own firefighters to help with Harvey fires, they can’t make up for the fact that the Harvey Fire Department is now severely and chronically understaffed. And due to the layoffs, the Harvey Fire Department now lacks any capacity to respond to emergencies in those neighboring suburbs in exchange.
“They’re supposed to be augmenting our manpower, they’re not supposed to substitute our manpower,” Freeman said. “Dolton comes to us because we promise that we’ll go to them. Well, we’ve cancelled all assistance to these sister departments of ours. So when, say, Markham gets a fire, they’re expecting two or more Harvey firemen to show up. We’re simply not going. We are not doing for them, and they’re continuing to do for us.”
City Treasurer Aisha Pickett and Alds. Tracy Key and Colby Chapman will host a community discussion of the city’s finances from 6 to 8 p.m. Thursday at the 2nd Ward office, 15446 Lexington Ave., Harvey.
The Harvey’s City Council is scheduled to meet on Monday. The last two regularly scheduled council meetings were canceled.
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