By Verónica Egui Brito
Miami Herald
HIALEAH, Fla. — Hialeah firefighters are set to vote on a new labor contract after two-and-a-half months of negotiations with the city, as union representatives accuse Mayor Bryan Calvo’s administration of playing politics with contract talks and undermining the department’s ability to retain qualified personnel.
Since negotiations began in July, the Hialeah Fire Department has lost five firefighters, including a paramedic/hazardous material technician trained to respond to incidents involving dangerous chemicals. When talks began, many firefighters saw the contract negotiations as an opportunity to stem the departures. The union had told the city that improving retention was a priority.
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The union will hold the vote Oct. 11, 12 and 13, with a separate voting day for each of the department’s three shifts. The agreement needs approval from 51% of the firefighters who vote to pass.
Union leaders are putting the proposal to a vote not because they are satisfied with the offer, they said, but because the city has declared it final. During the last bargaining session on Sept. 30, Jose Torres, Calvo’s chief of staff, told union representatives that the proposal was the city’s best and final offer.
The city is proposing a two-year contract that would give firefighters an 8% raise in the first year, plus an additional 2% for those trained as paramedics, who currently make up about 87% of the department’s personnel. The second year would bring another 7% raise.
For firefighters receiving the general raises, the increases would amount to a compounded 15.6% over two years. For paramedics, the total would be 17.7%.
The proposal falls short of the union’s demands and offers a smaller overall increase than the agreement the city reached with police officers in August.
The firefighters’ union sought raises of 10% in the first year, 8% in the second and 7% in the third, plus an additional 5% for paramedics. Its proposal was modeled on what the city described as the “historic agreement” reached with the police union.
The police contract provides officers with an 8% raise beginning in October, with an additional 5% for those with longer tenure. Further raises of 6% are scheduled for 2027 and 2028, amounting to compounded increases of roughly 25% to 30% over three years, depending on the applicable pay provisions.
But when negotiations turned to firefighters, the city argued that Amendment 3, a proposed property-tax measure on the November ballot that would decrease many homeowners’ tax burden, threatened municipal finances and limited its ability to offer more generous raises.
The timing raised questions about the city’s justification for limiting firefighters’ raises. Weeks before, Hialeah approved a more generous agreement with its police union without publicly invoking Florida’s proposed amendment as a constraint on the contract, even though the proposed tax measure could affect city revenue regardless of which department is involved.
Torres, Calvo’s chief of staff, was the city’s lead negotiator in talks with both unions. Torres is also a Hialeah police sergeant, placing him in the department whose members secured the more generous agreement. His dual roles have raised questions among firefighters about how the city approached the two negotiations. He is eligible for the raises under the police agreement he helped negotiate..
City officials also argued that firefighters were not as far behind their counterparts at other municipalities’ departments as police officers were. During negotiations, city officials even suggested that layoffs in the library system were necessary to fund the firefighters’ contract.
The debate comes as Hialeah has yet to establish a financial plan for what would happen if voters approve Amendment 3. The measure would have no revenue impact on the city in 2027 but could reduce revenue by about $17 million in 2028 and $28 million in 2029, according to the city’s projections.
At the same time, while the city has cited the need to save money to justify limiting firefighters’ raises, it is allocating $43 million for a City Hall renovation and $8 million to renovate the John F. Kennedy Library, a project that would include a museum inside the facility.
During the last bargaining session, Eric Johnson, president of the Hialeah Association of Firefighters Local 1102, warned that staffing levels are already thin.
“On behalf of this fire department. I am sounding the alarm. I am ringing the bell. Our staffing is low,” Johnson said.
He also accused the city of treating the fire department differently from the police department during contract negotiations.
“The city has been telling different council people or different people throughout that you got to fire people to save money for the fire department. That didn’t happen with the police department contract, you didn’t fire a single person,” Johnson said. ”We’re working on recruitment and retention. We need to do the same thing with fire across the board, especially when it comes to people that we can retain right now.”
A Miami Herald investigation published ahead of the July bargaining session found that Hialeah was losing firefighters faster than it could replace them, leaving fewer crews to respond to a growing number of emergencies and forcing the city to spend millions of dollars each year to keep fire trucks on the road.
At the start of negotiations, Hialeah’s Fire Department employed 226 firefighters, about 74 fewer than it did two decades ago, despite population growth and an increase in emergency calls.
The staffing shortage is expected to worsen. In July, about 14 firefighters were preparing to leave the department. Five have since left.
During negotiations, city Human Resources Director Elsa Jaramillo-Vélez asked union representatives whether firefighters had ever received a 7% raise after they expressed disappointment with the city’s offer.
Danny Cruz, a union representative, criticized the question as political theater, arguing that the department’s staffing problems require more than public statements about historic contracts.
“We’re not going to keep going there. Neither has PD. PD has never seen in their wildest imagination what they got. We’re not going to continue to do that in ‘historic contracts’ and these political soundbites,” Cruz said. “We’re 26% behind other fire departments.”
For some firefighters, the negotiations are a turning point in deciding whether to stay with the department or leave for another city.
The union is nevertheless putting the proposal to a vote, with leaders saying the city has made clear it will not offer more. Accepting the deal would provide raises, but it would not necessarily resolve the department’s retention problems.
Cruz said the union’s demands were about more than firefighters’ pay. Competitive salaries, he argued, are necessary to attract and retain qualified personnel and maintain public safety.
“Historic contracts only benefit the citizens of this town in order to retain and hire people to continue to make this fire department function safely,” Cruz said. “This is not a favor to us. We’re also thinking about the citizens. These needs that we’ve asked for are not just for the fire department.
“We are historically losing people. We are historically at the lowest when it comes to retention, recruitment and safety of this fire department,” he added. “We are historically running this place with EMTs and not paramedics. So when we talk about history, we have a lot of history to talk about.”
The department has increasingly relied on emergency medical technicians rather than paramedics amid a shrinking pool of qualified applicants and difficulties competing on salaries. Paramedics are trained to perform advanced life support procedures, while EMTs provide basic emergency care.
The vote will determine whether firefighters accept the city’s offer. But even if the contract passes, the department will still face the challenge to be the less competitive city with a fire department across Miami-Dade when started negotiations in the first place: retaining enough qualified personnel to keep its crews staffed and respond to more than 31,000 emergencies a year.
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