The Evolution of the Fire Service in Three Graphs

Last August I wrote a post entitled "Is Illinois Fire Service Model Economically Viable?" The post discussed recent trends that are pushing municipal governments toward the pursuit of alternative models for the provision of fire protection services. The primary trend, of course, is the growing cost to operate a municipal fire department. Personnel and pension costs are squeezing municipal budgets and threaten cuts to other services, or higher property tax bills for Illinois residents.

In particular, I wrote about plans by the Village of North Riverside to contract with a private company to provide fire protection. Not surprisingly, unionized firefighters are objecting vociferously to the privatization plans of the Village even though the arrangement would ensure that North Riverside's current firefighters are retained by the private company. North Riverside believes that transferring fire protection services to a private company could save taxpayers $750 thousand during the upcoming budget year. That's big money.

The post also discussed how mandates forced on municipal governments by the state have played a large role in driving up the costs to operate a municipal fire department. Included within the post was a list of 29 legislative enactments that were essentially giveaways to the politically powerful statewide firefighter union. Make sure to take a look at the list and consider it in the context of the charts below. It's quite astonishing.

Unionized firefighters actively work on campaigns, make substantial political donations to candidates, and year after year see their legislative agenda advance through the General Assembly. And the firefighter legislative agenda costs money. Taxpayer money.

The statewide firefighter union is presently working overtime to convince the General Assembly to expand collective bargaining rights to include fire department staffing levels. What this means is that if a bargaining unit and management disagree on how many firefighters are needed, the issue goes before an arbitrator. If the arbitrator sides with the union, then the municipality is compelled to hire more firefighters than the elected officials and their management teams, including the fire chief, believe are necessary.

Just having the right to bargain over minimum manning exerts an upward pressure on fire department costs. Why? Because local bargaining units could use the threat of taking the issue to arbitration to win a concession or two from the municipality. If the municipality fears the prospect of losing an arbitration hearing and having to absorb millions of dollars over multiple years in unnecessary personnel costs, you can bet that they will trade something else to avoid the manning requirement. That something else likely costs money.

Firefighters argue that they should be able to bargain over minimum manning requirements because appropriate manning and staffing issues are a matter of safety for the firefighters and the public. But manning and staffing levels are a prerogative of elected officials and their management teams. The last thing that municipal officials desire is to expose their residents to danger and risk because of an understaffed fire department. Consequently, fire departments are not understaffed in Illinois. How can we be sure? For starters, where is the ongoing media coverage about all of the lives lost and property damage incurred as a result of a fire department staffing crisis? This coverage doesn't exist. Why? Because there isn't a staffing crisis. We have plenty of firefighters in Illinois. And we appreciate what they do.

But what DO they do? The fire service has evolved tremendously over the last several decades. And here's some good news that often doesn't get reported. We don't need as many firefighters because we don't have as many structure fires. And that's a positive development. Fewer fires mean that residents are safer. It's a success story. But if there are fewer structure fires, why is the statewide firefighter union pressing so hard for the right to take manning and staffing levels to arbitration?

Job protection. It's that simple.

Vox published a terrific article about the changing nature of the fire service and what firefighters actually do. While I've linked to the article, I'm going to include three of the graphs from the article below because they tell the story quite effectively. After viewing the charts, ask yourself if we need a law that would empower fire unions and arbitrators to impose additional costs on taxpayers for the purpose of hiring more municipal firefighters.

The number of structure fires is declining:

While the number of paid firefighters has been increasing:

And the firefighters are mostly responding to medical calls and not structure fires:

Policymakers must recognize that the fire service has evolved and that fire departments might more appropriately be considered as "emergency service agencies." Combating fires will always be a component of the fire service. And communities have become very sophisticated in cooperating with each other through mutual aid agreements to ensure that sufficient fire suppression personnel and equipment arrive at the scene of a structure fire. But firefighting has become a secondary obligation. Medical responses are the primary obligation. And it's an important function.

The point of this post is not to somehow argue that firefighters don't do important things. They most certainly do. But the Illinois General Assembly needs to stop legislating as if the primary activity of the fire service is putting out fires with all of the attendant danger. It's expensive to taxpayers and no longer predicated in reality.

Politico Cites Statewide Ballot Questions

Politico has a story about the ballot measures on which voters will opine across several states. Here's what they say about Illinois' referendum questions:

Prairie State voters on Nov. 4 will make their voices heard on what’s turned out to be a wedge issue in the contentious Illinois gubernatorial race: a tax hike on millionaires.

But that’s all they’ll get to do — the ballot measure is nonbinding, merely allowing residents to express their opinions rather than changing tax policy.

The Tax for Education Question asks citizens if they want to amend the constitution to add another 3 percent tax on individuals earning more than $1 million, to fund education. 

Illinois is a flat tax state, so individuals of all income levels pay a 5 percent rate. 

But that will drop to 3.75 percent at the beginning of 2015 because of the expiration of a 2011 income surtax. That’s going to leave a revenue gap, according to Gov. Pat Quinn’s budget office — so he and the Democrats proposed filling the hole by hiking levies on the wealthier.

They tried to get a constitutional amendment on the ballot this year but failed to garner the three-fifths legislative approval required. Now they’re settling for the nonbinding ballot measure, which they hope will give their colleagues the cover to vote for the tax hike down the road. 

Meanwhile, opponents of the measure are accusing Democrats of flooding the ballot with nonbinding red-meat measures that attract liberals — like this one and a minimum wage hike — who would vote for Quinn over his neck-and-neck GOP challenger, Bruce Rauner, who opposes the tax.

The article doesn't mention all of the ballot questions in Illinois (voting rights, minimum wage, birth control, and crime victims rights), so you can probably assume that the article isn't a comprehensive source for the various ballot measures around the country.

Tribune Slams FY2015 State Budget

The Chicago Tribune read the Civic Federation's report about the FY2015 State Budget and recoiled in horror. 

The report paints a gloomy picture of a deeply problematic FY2015 state budget that Statehouse insiders have known about since the budget was passed in late May. Bottom line - the FY2015 budget was a sham budget full of gimmicks and short-sighted financial provisions. Kudos to the Civic Federation for its detailed analysis of a very political budget designed to allow legislators to get out of Dodge and face voters without having taken controversial votes to either make the current income tax levels permanent, or implement the massive cuts necessary to align spending with actual revenues. Go read the whole Civic Federation report here.

Anyway, the Tribune held nothing back in its assessment of the situation:

We've all known since the General Assembly's spring session that lawmakers passed a bogus budget, although we didn't know just how bogus. We wrote at the time that fraidy-cat lawmakers had neither made their temporary income tax hikes permanent nor passed a budget that realistically matches spending to revenues after those tax hikes start to roll back Jan. 1. Profiles in cowardice. 

Springfield's foolish insistence on spending tomorrow's dollars today is one reason that all three major bond rating agencies rank Illinois as the nation's least creditworthy state. Each agency also attaches a negative outlook to Illinois, meaning all three may downgrade the state's harmful credit rating even further: 

Standard & Poor's warned on July 23 that this current budget "is not structurally balanced and will contribute to growing deficits and payables that will likely pressure the state's liquidity." That's what happens when politicians don't want to lose revenue from a tax increase — and make no provision for the tax rollback that they wrote into law.

Here's how my organization described the budget in early June:

The budget appropriation bills include a total of $35.7 billion in spending for FY2015. This budget has been referred to as a “middle-of-the-road” budget because it establishes spending levels between the $38 billion budget that was proposed with the assumption that the existing income tax rates would be made permanent, and a proposed “doomsday” budget that would have reduced spending levels to $34.8 billion.

The budget approved and sent to the Governor includes spending in excess of available revenues and marks a return to the practice of using gimmicks such as inter-fund borrowing, dubious revenue growth assumptions, and insufficient payments to reduce bill backlogs. Without an extension of the income tax rates prior to January 1, 2015, the budget will spring a $2 billion hole that would necessitate service cuts and layoffs.

It's certainly a more diplomatic assessment, but reveals the same unfortunate reality. And that $2 billion hole may be on the low side. Things will get interesting at the Statehouse in January of 2015. The elections will be over, but the hangover will just be getting started. 

Another Example of the Illinois Prevailing Wage Act Costing Taxpayers

Via the Chicago Sun-Times and Better Government Association, we have yet another example of how the Illinois Prevailing Wage Act undermines responsible public spending by making projects more expensive than they need to be. This time the hit is being taken by the state's Urban Weatherization Initiative, which is a program intended to train and put people to work weatherizing homes:

Many of those who have gotten work through the program are being paid not at the $20 an hour expected rate for these relatively unskilled jobs but instead at the scale the state sets for skilled carpenters — as much as $49 an hour. That’s because the program’s architects failed to recognize salaries would need to be in accord with the state’s Prevailing Wage Act, which doesn’t have a category for weatherization workers. With each home limited to repairs of no more than $6,500, the inflated pay has eaten up money intended for the improvements.

“Contractors are running away from this” because of the high pay, says Kerry Knodle, executive director of the Illinois YouthBuild Coalition in Rockford, a nonprofit agency involved in the project. 

“It’s killing the program,” says Percy Harris, chairman of the volunteer state board Quinn appointed to oversee the initiative.

The weatherization program is part of the $31 billion Illinois Jobs Now infrastructure investment program. Whatever one might think of the program, it's abundantly clear that Illinois' current prevailing wage rules sometimes appear to do a better job of compensating workers than actually maximizing taxpayer dollars to achieve targeted goals. 

The Illinois Prevailing Wage Act needs to do a better job of balancing wages with results-oriented objectives.