By KARL FISCHER
Contra Costa Times (California)
Though the county has stockpiled $330,000 to help Richmond train firefighters as paramedics, the city’s department remains one of the few in Contra Costa with no current plans to add the service.
The fund will grow by $180,000 each fiscal year, Contra Costa County officials say -- $30,000 for six of Richmond’s seven engine companies -- but the city will not see a penny until it commits to an industry standard embraced by nearly every other professional fire department in the area.
“I don’t know the specifics of why they do not. All I have heard is that they are working on it,” said John Gioia, president of the Contra Costa Board of Supervisors. “The bottom line is, we’re all anxious to see this happen, sooner rather than later.”
A city that ranks among the state’s leaders in violent crime rates does not lack for political will. In the brochure advertising the city’s fire chief vacancy, starting a paramedic program is listed as one of a handful of specific expectations for the job.
But while the Richmond Fire Department continues to slowly stabilize after the city’s near-bankruptcy in 2004, managers and labor leaders agree that such a program will not likely begin here any time soon.
Richmond lost about one-third of its firefighters to layoffs in January 2004, soon after City Hall disclosed a $35 million budget deficit midway through the fiscal year. While interim Chief Michael Banks said he believes “2006 will be a good year for the fire department,” that is mainly because he can finally hire new workers to fill a dozen vacancies left by layoffs and attrition.
“We definitely do plan to” develop a paramedic program, Banks said. “But, obviously, with the challenges we’ve faced during the past two years in rebuilding our department and trying to get our staffing level back up, it’s been a little bit on the back burner.”
International Association of Firefighters Local 188, meanwhile, heads into contract negotiations this year still angry about the take-away contract forced upon it in 2004 by a city government that squeezed labor unions hard to help bring its finances back in order.
Restoring lost pay and benefits are current priorities for Local 188. While Richmond firefighters offered to attend paramedic training on their own time as a bargaining concession for the 2004 negotiations, according to union president Jim Russey, that offer is no longer on the table.
“We’ve been burned too many times,” Russey said. “And they never answered our proposals (in 2004), which included increasing staffing and restoring our (ladder) truck company.”
While Richmond rebuilds, fire departments beyond city limits continue to benefit from a stipend offered by Contra Costa Health Services for starting and maintaining paramedic training programs.
The county will pay $30,000 annually per engine company to any fire department that commits to staffing a paramedic on each of its fire engines at all times, said Art Lathrop, county emergency services director. The county will even pay for the period before those paramedics are trained, so long as their departments send them to training.
The county largesse springs from a 2004 modification of its contract with its emergency ambulance provider, American Medical Response.
“By putting a paramedic on the engine and taking a paramedic off the ambulance, we could get that level of care to the scene more quickly,” Lathrop said. “There would still be two paramedics at the scene, and there would not be a delay in the transport of critical patients to the hospital.”
The guaranteed presence of paramedics on fire engines allowed AMR to reduce staffing and relax mandatory response times in most parts of the county while still maintaining its minimum standard for care, Lathrop said. Engines generally respond to all calls that require ambulances.
In turn, the county freed about $2 million annually from the ambulance contract, which it now applies to fire department paramedic programs.
All of Richmond’s neighbors are now eligible for a share of that money, except for the Crockett-Valona Fire District, which is the region’s last all-volunteer department.
The Contra Costa Fire District, which has stations in San Pablo and El Sobrante, already had paramedics on most of its engines and is in the final stages of adding them to every engine company it keeps across the county, Chief Keith Richter said.
The El Cerrito and Pinole fire departments are both now training paramedics, and the Rodeo-Hercules Fire District will soon include the service on both of its engine companies.
“Everything just fell into place. The guys were willing to step up,” Rodeo-Hercules Chief Gary Boyles said.
But putting together a program in Richmond will prove much more difficult. Russey believes the department’s start-up cost would range from $1.5 million to $2 million, taking into account the additional equipment, training and personnel costs. The department would also have to negotiate pay and benefits for a new classification of employee.
The $30,000 per-engine funding would also not cover Richmond’s ongoing additional expense of maintaining a paramedic-staffed company, which Banks estimates would be around $54,000 per engine.
“It’s going to take some time for us to get there. Some of our staff are already paramedics, they’ve received that training and kept up that training on their own,” Banks said. “But in order to receive that money, you need to be fully committed to that program. It can’t be a hit-or-miss thing.”