By Robert Vitale
The Columbus Dispatch
COLUMBUS, Ohio — As Columbus officials look for the last cuts needed to balance the city’s 2009 budget, only one area has been declared off-limits.
The jobs of more than 1,500 firefighters are safe, thanks to their union’s offer to delay 4 percent pay raises that were set to kick in June 1.
How long Mayor Michael B. Coleman’s promise will last, however, is open to debate.
Coleman said he wouldn’t lay off firefighters to balance the budget, a pledge firefighters union leader Jack Reall takes to mean no layoffs for the entire year.
City finance officials, however, say the task of balancing the budget will be completed by the time City Council members adopt a spending plan, as early as Feb. 9.
What’s ahead for the national economy and its impact on local-government finances is anybody’s guess.
“No one can make any statements about what the situation might be in six months or a year,” Columbus Finance Director Joel S. Taylor said about Coleman’s pledge to firefighters.
A 15-member economic-advisory panel created last year by Coleman and Council President Michael C. Mentel has looked at Fire Division staffing as part of its work to make long-term recommendations to stabilize city budgets.
Robert Howarth, a lawyer and former government adviser who heads the panel, said the business leaders and government veterans studying city finances have yet to reach conclusions about any budget fix, which could include tax increases and other ideas.
But he and Coleman aides said the mayor’s no-layoffs promise doesn’t take the issue off the table.
“That’s certainly on our list of things to look at very carefully,” Howarth said.
Among the data advisers are studying: a report from Taylor’s office that lists Columbus third among the 25 largest U.S. cities in the amount spent per resident on fire protection.
The report shows Columbus spending $255.70 per person to pay for its Fire Division in 2008. Coleman’s proposed budget for 2009 would increase spending by $3.9 million — to more than $260 per resident — although delaying firefighters’ raises would eliminate much of the increase.
Only Boston and San Francisco spent more per person than Columbus on firefighting last year, according to the city report. Austin, Texas, by comparison, spends nearly $100 less per resident, although its population is nearly identical and its square mileage is larger.
Columbus had 1,550 fire-division employees in 2008, a higher ratio per 1,000 residents than Austin and 19 other big cities, including New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.
At an economic-advisory group meeting in December, one member questioned whether Columbus still can afford such a high level of service.
Reall has heard the argument before, because he said Taylor has made it since joining Coleman’s administration in 2000. The firefighters union president said he keeps them all in a file facetiously labeled, “The Most Expensive Fire Department in the Galaxy.”
He said Columbus looks overstaffed because its fire division includes emergency-medical services that are provided by separate departments in many cities.
In Austin, for example, the city employs 1,079 people in its fire department and 465 in an EMS department, which together total six fewer than the Columbus division that provides both services.
The mayor often repeats that Columbus spends more than 70 percent of its general-fund budget on police and fire protection. It was a campaign boast in 2007, but now it’s an example of why they’re no longer immune from cuts for 2009. But it’s misleading, too, according to Reall.
Some cities run the local public schools, he said, an expense that drastically reduces the relative budget percentage for public safety.
And none of the budget reports takes into account the quality of service provided, he said. A Dispatch analysis of the response times of 85 central Ohio fire departments in 2008 showed Columbus tied for third in getting to fires within six minutes of an alarm. Columbus firefighters responded that fast 89 percent of the time from 2003 through 2007.
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