By Anne Lindberg
The St. Petersburg Times (Florida)
PINELLAS PARK, Fla. — This city’s officials were proud that they managed to meet Amendment 1 spending constraints without laying anyone off.
For compliance’s sake, they did not fill positions that came open. Now Pinellas Park firefighters say department staffing has taken such a hit that expensive trucks are left sitting much of the time, putting lives at risk.
“Naturally, you start reducing staffing and there are several points of concern,” said Bert Williams, head of the Pinellas Park firefighters union. “Citizens have a greater potential of risk. Firefighters themselves have a greater potential of risk.”
But city officials say the concern is overstated. Primary response vehicles are not affected and if equipment is needed, the county’s mutual aid agreement calls for another department to provide what Pinellas Park does not have.
“It’s kind of one of those things that happens all the time. Vehicles are out of service for all kinds of reasons,” Pinellas Park spokesman Tim Caddell said. “It doesn’t really stop us from responding to calls. ... It’s not that the fire station is closed and can’t respond.”
At issue is a test program designed to save money by allowing reduced staffing and reduced overtime.
The idea sprang from the department’s standard operating procedure, which mandates a minimum number of personnel on each type of vehicle. But at times, there are not enough firefighters to staff a particular vehicle because of illness, vacation or training. When that happens, the city has a couple of choices — pay overtime for someone to fill the empty spot or take the vehicle out of service.
Out of service, Caddell said, merely means that the department calls the county dispatch to report that vehicle so-and-so is not being used. That way, if something happens and that type vehicle is necessary, dispatch knows to call another department for help.
In those cases, vehicles that are “out of service” seldom remain that way for long periods of time. But, faced with budget constraints, the city has not filled openings, leaving the department with three fewer firefighters than it had this time last year. Three firefighters is the equivalent of one fewer person per 24-hour shift. That’s hard enough, but the effect of the lost positions is multiplied when others are sick, in training, or on vacation.
Rather than pay massive amounts of overtime to make up for the reduced staffing, fire Chief Doug Lewis opted to take vehicles out of service and monitor the situation for 30 days. At the end of that time, Lewis said in an undated department memo, “we will carefully review the current staffing ... to determine what impact, if any, that it may have on our level of service.”
Three of the department’s 15 vehicles were used in the test. Two of them, a fire engine and a ladder truck, run out of Station 33 at 5000 82nd Ave. N, behind City Hall. The other is a squad truck based at Station 35 at 11350 43rd St. N.
The squad truck is designed to provide first-response emergency medical service as well as support at fires and other scenes. It has emergency medical equipment, like an EKG machine, cardiac drugs and other medications. It also carries items like extrication equipment, air bags for lifting heavy equipment, light towers for night work and a system to refill the air tanks firefighters use when they go into burning buildings.
Each vehicle costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, which added together amounts to more than $1-million. The squad and ladder truck were bought within the past two or three years. Caddell did not have detailed information.
The monitoring began Oct. 9. Between that time and early Friday afternoon, department records show that the squad was out of service for 143 hours. The engine was unavailable for 50.5 hours during that time. And the ladder truck was not available for use for 143.5 hours. In other words, from Oct. 9 through Oct. 31, one of those vehicles was unavailable 62.4 percent of the time. From Nov. 1 through about noon Friday, one of those was unavailable for 64.8 percent of the time.
Caddell said that does sound bad, but the nature of firefighting and emergency response is “they’re sitting there most of the time waiting to be used.”
He added that, so far, nothing indicates that the department has had any calls where equipment was unavailable.
“We wouldn’t do anything that would endanger the lives and safety of our residents,” Caddell said.
Copyright 2008, The St. Petersburg Times (Florida)