Elgin looking to trim $1.5M from fire department October 18th, 2009
ELGIN — City staff is set to talk with firefighter union members on Oct. 26 about cutting $1.5 million from the department’s budget.
On Friday, Elgin Association of Firefighters Local 439 president Lt. John Fahy said he had been contacted about setting up the session, which will include members of city staff and two members of the union’s board in addition to Fahy.
At a city council retreat last Wednesday, City Manager Sean Stegall said that to have a balanced budget for 2010, the city would have to make moves to fill a projected $5.54 million to $6 million shortfall.
So on Thursday, the city laid off 11 full-time staff and one part-time worker, converted one full-time job to part-time status, and decided not to fill a forester job that had been left open. Stegall said those layoffs should save Elgin about $1.2 million. That, combined with what the city will be asking from the fire department, would put the city at about half of its intended slashes.
Fahy is wary that any cuts at the level suggested for the fire department can’t happen without a reduction in services to the city.
As for what will be suggested, “We do have ideas, but they are ideas that will be shared with the fire union privately,” Elgin’s public information officer, Susan Olafson, said Friday.
What’s sure to be discussed is overtime. In 2008, when including such pay, eight of the top 10 wage-earners on the city’s payroll were ranking members of its fire department. In late summer, seven of the top 10 earners this year were firefighters.
Fahy and Fire Chief John Henrici have attributed the large overtime payout to the way the city agreed in the 1990s to staff the department, the way that a “Kelly Days” system plays into covering shifts, and the city not fully staffing two new stations that have opened since 2005.
The overtime covers openings due to employee vacations, sick days, people out with workmen’s compensation injuries, and Kelly Days. The latter is work reduction time that firefighters who work 24 hours on, 48 hours off shifts are entitled to by law.
Their current contract with the city allots Elgin firefighters a Kelly Day every ninth shift, or 13 a year, with a firefighter’s salary based on a 50.15-hour work week and any time over that counted as overtime. Henrici and Fahy have said they would like the city to consider hiring 12 more firefighters, which they say would decrease large overtime expenditures.
In September, Stegall told The Courier-News he “fully expect(s) that, through collaboration with the employees of the Elgin Fire Department, additional service delivery options will be presented in the near future. I would encourage people to focus on the overall costs of the fire department and the resulting services as opposed to focusing solely on compensation. Anything less will result in a limited view of the Elgin Fire Department and city services in general.”
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