City, fire union at odds over layoffs' impact

Evanston firefighters and city officials, in a heated public contract dispute, are showing sharp differences in their assessment of the emergency response impact of the layoff of three firefighter-paramedics this week.

City Manager Wally Bobkiewicz issued the layoff notices, which took effect Saturday. Bobkiewicz said he was eliminating the positions to fund any salary and benefit increases firefighters might gain after they sought arbitration for contract differences, specifically dealing with staffing levels.

Firefighters, long the strongest employee union in Evanston, filed an unfair-labor complaint against Bobkiewicz and the city, charging the layoffs amounted to coercion on the city manager's part to intimidate them from seeking arbitration.

City officials filed a counter labor complaint last week, saying firefighters are insisting on dictating staffing levels as a condition of negotiations.

Brian Scott, president of Local 742, the firefighters' collective bargaining agent, charged the officials are refusing to acknowledge the danger involved in closing a truck company from the city's north side and relocating it from the south side to Fire Station No. 1, at 1332 Emerson St. -- in effect cutting the truck company capability in half.

"A single company may sound inconsequential, but their absence could actually end up resulting in significant impact to our safety and to the safety of the people we have been sworn to protect," Scott said. "By reducing manpower, the department is eliminating a truck company that is designed specifically to have the biggest impact at our toughest fires and most challenging rescues. This could have the worst possible impact on a densely populated, vertical city like Evanston."

But city officials charged that the union is negotiating in public -- "investing its time and attention on spreading fear among residents," Bobkiewicz said. "I hope that the fire union will reconsider its priorities."

City officials maintain that staff changes implemented by interim Fire Chief Greg Klaiber this week will keep the number of units available for response at nine.

The deployment of one ladder truck, meanwhile, "remains well within the National Fire Protection Association for response within a two-and-a-half-mile radius of where the truck is stationed and four-minute, first-level response to all of Evanston."

Scott said the city response is based on a wrong assumption, that an ambulance is equivalent to a truck company.

He said both serve vital functions, but a truck company has specialized equipment for use in building fires and other specialized rescues. He said the response times cited by the city weren't supported by their own consultant and don't make sense.

"Evanston is eight square miles," he said. "If you place a truck company anywhere in Evanston, does it make any sense one truck company can cover eight square miles?"

Scott said the truck company taken out of service was involved in at least two recent life-saving efforts. He said timely response of Truck Company 23 last summer saved the life of a 38-year-old man in full cardiac arrest when other companies and ambulances were committed elsewhere.

He said the same company was responsible for a dramatic rescue last January, responding in under two minutes to Northwestern University's campus when a woman fell through some ice.

Meanwhile, he said, city officials have refused to agree to a call-back of one of the laid-off firefighters when another department member retires next month -- evidence the layoffs are not linked to a budget crisis.

The latest exchange of charges came as fire union members made a formal request of the city that a new bargaining session be scheduled. Scott said the two sides did meet July 26, when city officials rejected union members' plea to put other changes into effect rather than cutting a company.