Haste Makes Waste
Submitted to Brother Big Eye
by the Concerned Firefighters and Officers of Fairfax
Does the school system promote 40 teachers to assistant principals but use them as teacher’s aides because they have too many assistant principals? Or maybe they take turns being Assistant Principle while the other is doing basic teacher duties for the day? The fire dept likes to call this job sharing.
Does the police department promote 40 sergeants or lieutenants and assign multiple ones to drive each other around? Do they double up at police stations because there are so many of them? Do they just work as street police officers as minimum staffing as part of their current shift? Maybe they take turns too job sharing like the fire dept. And everyone gets paid a hefty amount.
You may or may not find this to be interesting but we can't help but wonder how fire dept administration continues to make numerous promotions when the rest of the county is in a "budget crisis". Especially when many of these promoted will still work in a fire fighter rank position. Granted this doesn't happen to all of them all of the time but our study shows in the last 90 days there have been multiple Lieutenants assigned to work as fire fighters approximately 85% of the time. Meaning there are two officers on one fire unit. This happens because we have promoted too many Officers. Is this called mismanagement? And to our surprise one unit in particular, Rescue Company 401 has had three lieutenants assigned to it at one time on multiple days. Three of the four personnel assigned and riding that unit were supervisors. What? And the Fire Chief justifies making more promotions?
The Fire Chief does this because they removed the EMS Lieutenants from many of the Medic Units. But rather then be a fiscally responsible leader and turn those positions in he and his staff keep those numbers and promote approximately 35 (now 40) fire fighters to lieutenants. Is this because of the pressure from both the firefighter and officer unions?
The park service or libraries wouldn't keep extra supervisor positions just because they're in the budget. That would be called wasteful spending.
Hence the 100K a year fire fighter. The average annual base salary of a Lieutenant is reaching a 100K this is what they earn to do the same job of a fire fighter. Now admittedly it’s not every day the same Lieutenant is working in a fire fighter rank position but this happens much more frequently than ever before. Recent numbers showed approximately 8-10 fire units having at least two officers assigned to them consistently across all three shifts. How does the department or Ops 6 spin those numbers to the Board of Supervisors?
Last week fire department senior staff approved approximately four lieutenant, four captain I and four captain II promotions. These were supposedly to fill vacancies. However, didn't the fire department budget have to relinquish some positions? Capt II in Investigations, Deputy Chief in Special Projects and four Lieutenants from Communications? The only ones that were really affected were the Lieutenants. Now they will be sent to the field to ride fire units assigned as fire fighters not Lieutenants. But they will continue to the hold rank and pay of a Lieutenant. Again this is because of excessive officers.
We remember when the Fire Chief spoke to the BOS during the public safety committee hearing. He was asked if these new Lieutenants would be used at Battalion Chief Drivers. His reply was, "no they would not". This however is not the current situation. The past year has shown battalion chiefs assigning themselves lieutenants as drivers due to surplus lieutenants assigned to the field. Surprisingly, our research has showed some fire station shifts to have a 1 to 1.5 supervisor to subordinate ratio. (5 Lieutenants or higher rank to 6 fire fighter/technicians.) This is too much even for the fire service.
The Fire Chief will say these promotions saved money in overtime. However again he's not telling the whole story which is overtime for firefighters and paramedics has increased. Furthermore some of the lieutenants promoted were paramedics as well. They dropped their medic certification which resulted in increased medic overtime because those lieutenants didn't want to ride as medics any longer after their promotion.
The reason we are exposing this information is because we have witnessed waste and mismanagement for far too long. You have too! Our credibility has been proven from past correspondence and we remain confident if addressed appropriately the right actions can be taken to minimize impact of FRD and the general county budget not only now but in the future.
Our question to you the members; Do you care? If so, please consider submitting emails with information of wasteful spending and staffing. We will follow-up and expose the issues to the proper people. The Union and other associations have their own agenda which is fine but we feel no one wants to take on the major issues with OUR fire and rescue department. Make your comments known sign up and be heard…
Is this what it looked like when they were deciding to promote forty something extra Lieutenants?