The Second Supper published a excellent article by Thomas Brown exposing how the La Crosse Fire Department waste taxpayer's money through inefficiencies. Basically the fire department is running a first responders service with big rig fire trucks. Below is the article.
On a Monday night on the southside of La Crosse, a softball was lifted softly to right field for a single. As the ball was tossed back into the infield, the woman playing second base was caught unaware; her glove not ready, her face becoming the unintended target. The woman's teammates cried out to the umpire to call an ambulance. At their behest, an ambulance was called. It arrived promptly with medical professionals ready to administer any and all type of care to her as she sat there, blood flowing steadily from her nose. Then, for some reason, a fire truck came. Fully equipped with four firefighters and all the essentials of fighting fires, scaling tall buildings and hosing down half a city block — completely unnecessary at Powell Park where a bloody nose was being tended to by paramedics.
All of this happened shortly after mayor Matt Harter had been publicly castigated for stating that there are redundancies that take place with La Crosse Fire Department. He essentially pointed out that, based on the numbers, our fire department is overstaffed, and the cost burden is tremendous when compared to their necessity to the population of La Crosse.
But the city council, afraid to err on the side of common sense and terrified to make a decision that would initiate change, backed Fire Chief Gregg Cleveland and decided that the city actually needs more firefighters. Emboldened, Cleveland is now asking for an unprecedented fifth fire station to be built in La Crosse. Why, because of all the bloody noses and paramedic calls that the department responds to? Come on, now. Let's look at the numbers.
La Crosse has not grown significantly in either population or area in decades, and given our geographic boundaries and demographic trends, it’s not likely to happen anytime soon. So why does our fire department need to get any bigger?
When Harter made the call to freeze firefighter overtime in May, it would have reduced staff by one and a half people per station. For a well run department/company/business of any kind, that kind of minor subtraction will not be felt.
The La Crosse Tribune has certainly told one side of this story, and anyone will get riled up when told about supposed cuts to “public safety.” But isn’t it the mayor’s job to find the most effective way to run the city?
Don’t get me wrong: La Crosse's firefighters do a good job. Let's not complain about the service. But La Crosse is already one of Wisconsin's most heavily taxed cities, so it's ludicrous to think we can't at least trim the fire department's $10 million budget.
Here is what La Crosse taxpayers are actually paying for: In 2010, the La Crosse Fire Department responded to 155 fire-related calls. Seventy-five of these calls were for structural fires (the kind that one may see in the newspaper). Of no fault of its own, the department actually responds to nearly 3.5 times as many false alarms as it does actual fires.
Oh yeah, guess how many calls the La Crosse Police Department respond to with essentially the same budget and staff: If you guessed almost 58,000 calls, you would be correct.
To think that the city of La Crosse can't cut back on the roughly 100 people it takes to respond to 155 fire-related instances is ridiculous. What about the other ways in which they serve the community? Well, last year, there were a total of 4,818 incidents reported in the Fire Department's operation report.
What else do firefighters do? In a document presented to the City Council in January, the department listed that in 2009, there were a total of 5,412 inspections. And that's how the department can justify all the spending: They prevent fires from happening.
So, if we're going by the numbers, that's a total of 10,230 incidents and inspections performed by the LCFD on a yearly basis. For all the firefighters that Chief Cleveland claims to need, that's a total of three and a half duties performed each day by each firefighter.
That seems reasonable, yet from Dec. 28, 2010, to Jan. 28, 2011, the chief still managed to find a way to rack up 5,619.75 overtime hours. That comes in at 305.4 percent of the department’s overtime budget.
It's kind of impressive, actually. Impressive that nobody has bothered to look at these numbers before — or if they have, they never bothered to call the La Crosse fire chief out, not for decades.
Last year, I coached a baseball team. One of the young men on it was a high school senior from La Crosse. I asked him what he wanted to do post-graduation, and he said that he wanted to become a firefighter. I asked him why he chose to pursue that career path and he told me it's because they watch SportsCenter. Apparently that's what he did for five hours when he went to visit the department this past fall. (I was delighted to hear that he has recently chosen to go to school to be a teacher.)
Just because 100 people (a very small percentage of the city's population) show up to a meeting and the city council is too scared to make an unpopular decision doesn't mean that there isn't an issue here. There clearly is. The city's streets are falling apart; the sewage system needs to be revamped; Bliss Road hasn't been operational since Clinton was in the White House; and nobody can figure out where the city will get the money to pay for these necessities.
Meanwhile, the fire department soaks up a third of the city tax base answering in full force to bloody noses. One-hundred and fifty-five fire-related calls, a few calls each day between catching highlights on SportsCenter — and still, the chief wants more.
If Cleveland could make the argument that the city needs a fifth fire station, that it needs more personnel, then fine. That’s a dialogue we can all have. But inflating the numbers and duplicating services that could easily be performed by the police department or medical professionals alone is not the way to plead a case. Neither is calling up a favorite newspaper reporter and fanning the flames that an overtime freeze is somehow a threat to public safety.
How long will the city of La Crosse let this budget inequality smolder? Do the math. Be reasonable. Men lie, women lie, numbers don't.
A popular public safety strategy these days is to have one "Public Safety" department often having dual purpose employees doing both fire and police work. When needed they are supplemented by volunteer firemen. It makes good sense to me. There is no need to have 2 separate administrative staffs duplicating duties. Then perhaps more appropriate responses could be arranged for each type of "emergency".
ReplyDeletea few weekends ago, during a loggers baseball game, an injured player needed to an ambulance for a ride to the hospital. the paramedics from the ambulance could not transport that player from the field until the fire department showed up. i can understand where a building may present interference for paramedics or jaws of life are needed to free someone in a car accident, but there's no reason the ambulance could not have transported that baseball player from the field during the loggers game. this is a gold-plated fire department and the only individual looking out for the taxpayers' interests with relation to any department is the mayor himself. nobody has been able to explain why an la crosse equivalent-sized city such as sheboygen, wi has 2/3 to 3/4 of la crosse' firefighting budget and personnel. what is sheboygen doing la crosse can't do? viewing the fire department itself, one item stands out: the monitor street firehouse should be shut down and placed back on the tax rolls. the firehouse on gillette street could be augmented and immediate tax dollars could be saved. on another note, two branch libraries should be closed in la crosse and those branches should be put back on the tax rolls. this is a gold-plated government town that seems to be run by ACORN, not the taxpayers. the taxpayers are THE MAN. instead, the taxpayers are the forgotten man.
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