By Jim Daws
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Copyright 2006 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Atlanta firefighters are struggling to maintain the dignity of our profession. While our members willingly risk life and limb to protect Atlanta’s residents, we are annually forced to fight a rearguard action against Mayor Shirley Franklin, who seems hellbent on reducing our status in Atlanta public safety to second class.
Historically, Atlanta firefighters and police officers were paid an equal annual salary. When she originally ran for mayor, Franklin pledged to return to that policy, which had been broken just two years earlier by then Mayor Bill Campbell.
But in 2004, Franklin abandoned her pledge and began offering larger raises for police officers, and she has done so in every budget since. Her change of heart is no happenstance.
In July 2002, the Atlanta City Council unanimously passed a resolution authorizing the mayor to create an Atlanta Police and Fire Foundation to solicit corporate donations to fund public safety improvements in a time of austere budgets.
Franklin signed this resolution. Just two months later a foundation was established attracting a who’s-who of Atlanta¹s corporate community. Trouble is, it was now just the Atlanta Police Foundation — the Fire Department was somehow omitted.
The first thing the new foundation did was to fund a study, to the tune of $826,000, to justify increased police salaries and other reforms — all of which were badly needed. But no mind was paid to the fact that the firefighters were equally underpaid and had been for as many years.
The Atlanta Police Foundation has become a very well funded and politically influential organization.
At one of their functions in 2004, the same year she broke her parity pledge, Franklin promised police raises of 40 percent.
The city can’t afford to keep both of those promises, so firefighters have been tossed under the bus. If the mayor has her way, we will continue to be the lowest-paid major department in the metro area even though we run more calls and take much greater risks than any fire department in the region.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Thanks to a booming economy and a large budget surplus, Atlanta could afford to make its firefighters and police the best-paid public safety officers in the metro area. But it will take a great deal of political courage by Atlanta’s City Council members.
Jim Daws is president of the Atlanta Professional Firefighters Association.