Houston Firefighters Scuttle Cost-Control Deal

June 18--Houston firefighters overwhelmingly rejected a tentative contract that would have given them a 4 percent raise in exchange for accepting scheduling limits aimed at curtailing overtime, raising questions about the department's ability to contain costs as City Council prepares to vote Wednesday on a budget for the coming fiscal year.

Mayor Annise Parker's administration had sought the scheduling controls in hopes of reining in overtime costs, which were driving the Houston Fire Department over budget earlier this year. The budget crisis led the city to pull ambulances and fire trucks from the streets on some days to control overtime caused by having to replace firefighters who took unscheduled days off.

That crisis was addressed in March with a temporary contract in which firefighters agreed to give up some freedom to take time off in exchange for a 2 percent raise and a $975 lump-sum payment. Those scheduling controls expire June 30.

The contract rejected Tuesday by 93 percent of the roughly 2,900 firefighters voting would have taken a similar approach, granting a pay raise in exchange for concessions on members' ability to take leave. With the no vote, as of July 1 members of Houston Professional Fire Fighters Association Local 341 enter an "evergreen" period under their prior contract that would run through 2016 unless a new agreement is approved.

The evergreen situation would provide no raises, but imposes few effective caps on how many firefighters can take time off, raising questions about whether the department's proposed $507 million budget for the fiscal year that begins July 1 includes enough money to cover overtime costs, and whether HFD will repeat the fiscal woes of recent months.

"Make no mistake about it, this is a resounding statement that the firefighters are together on this. That the concessions are too high, that giving back was enough," said fire union president Bryan Sky-Eagle, whose team negotiated the deal. "I'm very optimistic we'll go back to the table and find out what went wrong and try to fix it."

Parker said the city is willing to return to the bargaining table. She said it is far from clear, however, that the union will be able to win more favorable terms from a city council that opposed hiking HFD's overtime budget earlier this year and is poised to vote Wednesday on several items that would cut her proposed $2.4 billion general fund budget.

"If they want to come back with the idea of significant pay raises in the next year, I'm just going to have to say it will be seriously impacted by what Council does, and my sense of the mood of Council is they're not wanting to put a whole lot more money in the budget," the mayor said.

Laying off firefighters or operating trucks with fewer than four firefighters will not be an option in the city's efforts to stay within budget without the rejected contract's scheduling controls, Parker said. The only options, she said, are pulling vehicles from service or changing from four to three shifts.

Firefighters negotiated a promise against such a shift change in the rejected contract, in part, because the switch would grant them fewer consecutive days off and would present fewer opportunities for promotion. The typical week under a three-shift model would see a firefighter working three 24-hour shifts rather than two, though each employee still would work 20 shifts over a 72-day cycle, as is done today.

Changing HFD's shifts likely would cut overtime among officers, since the department deploys four sets of commanders today and would need only three, Executive Assistant Fire Chief Richard Mann said. Because of the department's staffing shortage, he said, changing the shift schedule may not produce any overtime savings among the rank and file.

Fire Chief Terry Garrison stressed that a shift change is only one idea being considered. Garrison said he first plans to ask the mayor and council for a larger overtime budget. Failing that -- or the passage of a new union contract -- Garrison said he will examine whether changing to three shifts would save money, and then would consider pulling fire trucks out of service.

"It was one of the options we were looking at," Garrison said. "If we're going to disrupt the schedule of 4,000 members, we need to make sure there's cost savings in there."

Sky-Eagle said he plans to survey the membership to determine their reasons for opposing the contract, but Garrison, Mann and some firefighters pointed to the open opposition of Todd Clark, chairman of the fire pension board.

The pension board and the union are separate, but historically, the union contract has allowed the Houston Firefighters' Relief and Retirement Fund chairman to be assigned full time to the pension office while drawing a fire department salary. That assignment was dropped in the rejected contract, meaning Clark would have needed to work shifts at a fire station and do pension work on his days off. Clark had called the change "retaliation" from the mayor.

"It sends a very strong message to this mayor by the firefighters that they will not allow her to dictate who sits in the pension fund office," Clark said. "The issue here for me was just to let the membership know that, by removing the chair, it places us at a severe disadvantage in protecting the fund."

Parker dismissed his assertions.

"He's still a firefighter. The other unions don't pay their members on the city clock to do pension organizing, the pension funds themselves pay for that, and that's what we thought ought to happen here," Parker said. "Truly, if it was about one man's ego, that would be a really interesting result to talk about."

Councilman Ed Gonzalez said officials had hoped the vote would provide more stability for HFD.

"There's still an opportunity to come back to the table, but time is running out. We're about to approve a budget," he said. "If something does come forward later and it's not budget-neutral, it could go back to what we had last year."

Councilman C.O. Bradford said the administration's leak of a memo about the idea of changing shifts while voting was happening and the decision to change Clark's assignment contributed to the result.

"The rejection of the deal brings a very serious fiscal issue to the table. I don't know how I can vote (Wednesday) to approve the budget with this issue not addressed," Bradford said. "Now, we don't know, the fire chief doesn't know, what model, what plan we're going forth under."

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