HOUSTON (Houston Chronicle) – The city would send about a third fewer firefighters to handle small blazes at single-family homes under a plan Houston Fire Chief Sam Peà±a said would free up resources without hurting the department’s ability to handle minor emergencies.
If implemented, Peà±a’s proposal would send 20 personnel to tackle reports of fires – from sparking outlets to incipient fires – at one- or two-story residences of 2,000 square feet or less. Peà±a told reporters Friday that the department often sends more personnel and equipment than necessary to handle those calls.
“This is not to limit the number of resources that are deployed to handle the needs of the incident,” Peà±a said. “These are, again, to address and ensure that we are providing the right resources to the right call.”
For now, though, the department plans to continue deploying 31 to 32 personnel to those fires while firefighters undergo training under the new model. Peà±a also said he would meet with the Houston Professional Fire Fighters Association to “discuss any concerns” before implementing the new procedure.
Ultimately, Peà±a said, house fire calls make up a small portion of the department’s fire responses, and sometimes delay firefighters from responding to more serious emergencies.
In the 2018 fiscal year, the Houston Fire Department received about 348,000 service calls, more than 46,000 of which were for fire-related incidents. Of those, about 1,600 were calls for house fires, Peà±a said, and only about 500 of those met a scale that required the department to deploy additional resources.
In those cases, Peà±a said, incident commanders would retain the authority to dispatch additional firefighters if they believe more than 20 are needed.
The fire chief also said the new policy has nothing to do with Proposition B, a charter amendment approved by voters last November that requires the city to pay firefighters the same as police of corresponding rank and experience. Mayor Sylvester Turner has warned of potential layoffs to fund the pay raises, noting they did not come with a funding mechanism.
Amid Pena’s policy announcement, the Turner administration and the firefighters’ union continued their public war over Prop. B.
The mayor, in apparent response to the Houston Federation of Teachers’ decision to rescind its support of his reelection bid this year, released a lengthy public letter Friday proclaiming his support for collective bargaining rights.
In the letter, Turner said he had sent the union a proposal to phase in the cost of parity over 5 years, “which would substantially eliminate the need to lay off or reduce services beyond the normal budgetary process.”
Fire union president Marty Lancton soon issued a statement saying the city had made no offer to implement the proposition “as approved by voters” and said “any suggestion otherwise is a lie,” though he said the union still was communicating with Turner’s office about implementing the measure.
In response, the mayor’s office released emails and documents showing two offers it had made to raise firefighters’ pay over 5 years retroactive to Jan. 1, and one offer the union had submitted to phase the raises in over three years retroactive to July 1, 2018.
The city’s first offer would give firefighters a 4 percent base pay raise for the first six months of 2019, then a series of annual increases averaging between 4 percent and 6 percent a year through the 2023 fiscal year, with a total cumulative cost of $224 million through the end of June 2023.
The city’s second offer, sent in a Feb. 19 email from City Attorney Ron Lewis to union lawyer Troy Blakeney, increased the annual raises in future years, producing a cumulative cost of $291 million by June 2023. The offer also proposed doubling HFD’s $13 million budget for incentive pay and phasing in that increase at an unspecified pace over five years.
Neither offer, though, appears to fully implement the charter amendment by the end of the five-year period. For instance, the city’s proposal to simply double firefighters’ incentive pay does not match what the finance department projects would be necessary to achieve full parity with police officers.
The union’s Friday offer would phase in parity over three years, beginning with firefighters getting a quarter of the parity-driven raises dating back to July 1, 2018. As of July 1, 2019, members with 18 years of service will would reach full parity with police, and younger members would get another 50 percent of the parity raises to which they are entitled. Members with less than 18 years of service would reach full parity by July 1, 2020.
That approach would save the city an estimated $120 million, the union wrote, savings that they proposed the city use to build a “Firefighter Wellness Center” on union-owned land. The union also expressed interest in creating a trust to fund retired firefighters’ health care benefits, removing that liability from the city’s books, and discussed negotiating parity in incentive pays, saying that “may represent a further cost savings to the city.”
Lewis, in an email to Blakeney later that day, called this offer a “curveball” that raised issues unrelated to the proposition, and attached an unidentified document Lewis said was “the product of Mr. Lancton’s media campaign,” inquiring whether the union intended to continue talking.
Blakeney responded that the union was committed to working with the city “to FULLY implement Prop B,” and invited further proposals. Blakeney said the two sides had met three times, on Jan. 31, Feb. 7 and Feb. 22, and that the third meeting had ended with city officials indicating “there was nothing to talk about” and leaving without indicating future meetings were planned.
Those emails did not paint a full picture of the city and union’s correspondence, Lancton said. He provided a chain of emails that show Blakeney asking Lewis in early February for financial information regarding incentive pay contained in the police contract.
By Feb. 15, Lewis had not provided the incentive pay information, emails show, and Lancton said the union had yet to receive the proposal.
jasper.scherer@chron.com
mike.morris@chron.com
