By Larry Sandler
The Journal Sentinel
MILWAUKEE — Less than a week into the new year, a shortage of paramedics has opened a $300,000 hole in the Milwaukee Fire Department budget — a gap that city officials admitted should have been caught before the 2010 spending plan was adopted.
Authorities are now rushing to set up a paramedic trainee class and to figure out how to pay for it, officials told a Common Council committee Thursday.
At the same time, Acting Fire Chief Michael Jones and city economist Dennis Yaccarino said they are revising the budget to hire more firefighters and immediately reduce the number of firefighting companies being taken temporarily out of service from three to two a month.
Those comments came as the council’s Public Safety Committee summoned the administrators to explain why the temporary service outages, or “brownouts,” were affecting more firefighting companies than aldermen had expected.
In his 2010 city budget, Mayor Tom Barrett proposed shutting down two companies permanently and temporarily closing at least one other company every day, on a rotating basis. At the urging of Ald. Bob Donovan, the council voted instead to close one company permanently and increase the number of brownouts to two a day.
But when the Fire Department announced its plans to shut down three companies a day, Donovan called for a hearing before the committee, which he leads.
Jones said an unexpectedly large number of firefighters and paramedics had retired, pushing up overtime expenses, and he was concerned about staying within his budget.
Some staffing problems will be eased when a class of about 50 firefighters graduates from the Safety Academy in February, said David Seager, newly elected president of the Milwaukee Professional Firefighters Association.
To plug the remaining gaps, the city will seek to add a second class of 35 to 50 firefighters in June and a class of 12 paramedics as soon as possible, Jones and Yaccarino said. Reducing spending on overtime likely would cover the cost of the firefighter class, but the city may have to dip into its contingency fund to pay for the paramedic class, Yaccarino said.
A paramedic class had been planned for 2009, but was cut from last year’s budget with the understanding it would be included in 2010, said Yaccarino, a senior member of the city’s budget team. However, the class was not included, he said.
Donovan said it was “just unconscionable” that the budget staff would not notice the looming paramedic shortage or accurately forecast the number of retirements.
Yaccarino said he would not make excuses, adding: “We just missed one. . . . I made the mistake of not double-checking, which I will take responsibility for.”
Barrett said he learned of the problem just days ago and credited Yaccarino for informing elected officials.
A cap on shutdowns
Ald. Michael Murphy, chairman of the council’s Finance & Personnel Committee, said he would push to use a $100,000 payment from Summerfest to help pay for the paramedics. At Murphy’s urging, Summerfest recently agreed to the annual fee for police and fire services as part of a lease extension.
Based on the moves to add a second firefighter class, Jones said he would reduce the number of brownouts from three to two this week.
For the rest of the year, the brownouts will rotate among 11 engine companies and 11 ladder companies in 11 firehouses that are home to two companies each, Jones said. Six companies based in three firehouses downtown and on the east side were exempted from the brownouts because of the density of the neighborhoods they serve, he said.
The committee unanimously supported Donovan’s resolution urging Jones to cap the number of brownouts at two. The full council will consider the issue Jan. 20.
Barrett - who has battled the firefighters union over staffing cuts throughout his tenure - released figures showing that the six fire deaths in each of the last two years were tied for the second-lowest death toll in 52 years, not just the past 26 years as previously thought.
He also said the 2008-'09 figure was the lowest two-year total in that period. The lowest fire death toll was four in 1998; six people each also died in fires during 1995 and 2002. Figures are incomplete before 1957, officials said.
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