Metro Chiefs Tackle Fiscal Restraints
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The Editor’s Opinion Page
According to the attendees at the recent IAFC Metropolitan Chiefs Committee spring conference in Memphis, Proposition 13 has definitely had a ripple effect on the fire service. And “fiscal restraint” was probably the most bandied about phrase that we heard. While gloom did not prevail, frustration was on everybody’s mind.
The Metro Chiefs, incidentally, represent every fire department with at least 400 members or which serves a population of 200,000 or more. When they speak of fiscal restraint, they are speaking in terms of millions—many millions—of dollars.
Fiscal restraint, of course, is just a new and slightly elegant phrase that replaces an older one called “tight budget.” Indeed, many fire departments have been operating for so long under such restraint, it seems like forever. But for those of us who were in the fire service back during the Great Depression, today’s fiscal restraint seems like absolute affluence.
During the Depression some great cities and many smaller ones went broke. The fire service in some cities received what was euphemistically called a payless furlough (you worked, but didn’t get paid). New apparatus and equipment was out of the question and a city like New York squeaked by with about 10 new pumpers and aerials a year—hardly a replacement program. Fortunately this depression period followed the great apparatus expansion period of the 1920s and everybody made do—actually until after World War II when the fire service started on an expansion program that lasted until the 1970s.
So the fire service has had its ups and downs and like any other profession will continue to have them. As one chief put it in Memphis, “We are in a leveling off period—we will have to pull in our horns.” However, this chief also said that “a fire department exists to save live and property—not money.” What to do about this dilemma occupied the minds of the Metro Chiefs for two and a half days.
They were all against reducing manpower even though manpower represented 85 to 95 percent of their budgets. Manpower had already been reduced too much, they felt. But since major apparatus represented such a major outlay, some felt that this was an area that could be explored. One chief spoke of an “apparatus service life extension program” which calls for a strict maintenance schedule for all apparatus, plus an apparatus rebuilding program when the maintenance program is not enough. He noted that in 1968 a standard pumper cost about $32,000. Today it is up around $70,000. In his department eight 10-year-old pumpers were completely rebuilt at a cost of $37,500—a considerable savings and a job that will add many years to their service life.
There were other comments and suggestions on this fiscal restraint, but the one we remember most was from the chief of one of our larger cities who told his audience “to lay the fire problem on the mayor’s lap. It is as much his problem as yours.”
