By Frank Donze
Times-Picayune (New Orleans)
Copyright 2006 The Times-Picayune Publishing Company
Frustrated by City Hall’s refusal to include them in a package of pay raises earmarked for public safety personnel, veteran New Orleans firefighters said Tuesday that they are taking their appeal directly to the public.
Fire union leaders said they are about to launch an awareness campaign designed to remind New Orleanians of the sacrifices their members made during Katrina and continue to make today. While Mayor Ray Nagin has called for a substantial increase in the paltry salaries for rookie firefighters, he infuriated veterans by leaving them out of the plan.
The campaign will begin with a billboard alongside an Interstate 10 exit near the French Quarter, featuring photographs of firefighters at work next to the message: “Come Hell or High Water.”
Union officials said they plan to follow in short order with additional billboards and words of support from private citizens helping to underwrite the effort.
“You will see movers and shakers standing side by side with firefighters very shortly,” said Nick Felton, president of the New Orleans Fire Fighters Local 632, who declined to name the donors or offer additional details.
In the meantime, Felton said, the union will make its case for veteran firefighters to be included in the pending pay raises when the matter comes before the city’s Civil Service Commission today. While the commission must consider the plan first, the final decision on pay matters rests with the City Council.
Last month, Nagin recommended raising salaries for all police officers by 10 percent and boosting the annual starting pay for rookie firefighters by $5,300. Nagin said the proposal represents an attempt to slow an escalating post-Katrina exodus of police and fire personnel.
That infuriated the firefighters union, which argued that older firefighters also deserve more money.
“Not one of these firefighters who stayed here during Katrina, who never backed down, who never left their posts, is getting one penny increase out of this,” Felton said during a morning news conference outside a shuttered Treme fire station that was hit hard by Katrina’s floodwaters.
In defending his plan, Nagin has said the Police Department has suffered more attrition than the Fire Department and emergency medical workers, whom he also excluded from the pay-raise plan. Moreover, the mayor said he fears the police force could shrink even more drastically as other law enforcement agencies, such as the State Police, aggressively recruit in New Orleans.
Nagin also reiterated that firefighters, unlike other municipal workers, benefit from a state-mandated, 2 percent annual pay increase that kicks in after three years on the job. Nagin cited the so-called longevity raises as his reason for leaving firefighters out of citywide pay increase in 2003.
Felton said the mayor is not telling the whole truth.
Fire Department brass told council members last week that personnel losses are hampering the agency’s ability to do its job.
Superintendent Charles Parent said the department’s pre-Katrina workforce of 770 employees was already 55 fewer than called for in the city budget. Because of resignations and retirements, Parent said, it now has 695 employees, including 651 firefighters.
With 100 or so firefighters out on sick leave at any given time, Parent said he is down to between 30 and 60 members on a given day. Meanwhile, as many as five fire trucks are inoperable each day because of mechanical problems, Parent said, many of them caused by operating in saltwater during the flood.
As for the longevity pay, Felton said if the automatic annual salary increases were “so great and so juicy, " the pay for New Orleans firefighters would not compare so poorly with their counterparts in comparable cities.
Information provided by the union shows that the basic annual pay for a firefighter with one year of service amounts to $21,130, or $8.24 an hour, less than they might make “flipping hamburgers,” Felton said.
He also distributed a list of salaries from other cities showing that firefighters are paid more than $32,000 in Houston and Memphis, Tenn.; more than $27,000 in Baton Rouge; more than $24,000 in Shreveport; and nearly $34,000 in Hammond.
In Jefferson Parish, firefighter recruits are paid 32 percent more a year than in New Orleans, and they earn from 10 percent to 46 percent more at each level as they advance in rank, figures presented by Felton showed.
“We’re in a very dangerous situation, and we’re playing with a loaded gun here,” Felton said.
The salary issue, along with equipment failures and what he called “miserable” working conditions -- firefighters working out of trailers, for instance -- probably will encourage even more veterans to seek greener pastures.
And hiring and training their replacements will take time, he said.
“You just can’t replace them in one day,” he said. “You’re not going to be able to go down to the local supermarket and buy 100 or 150 firefighters.”