A big fire is burning down at City Hall, and the fire chief is heading for the hills.
City Manager Troy Schulte and Mayor Sly James have pinned Chief Smokey Dyer into a corner with their directive that he come up with a plan to cut $7.5 million from the Fire Department’s budget.
In his 2012-2013 budget message to James last month, Schulte proposed cutting 105 firefighters. Fire calls, he said, have dropped by more than 60 percent the last 10 years, largely because of improved building codes, inspections and fire prevention education. Clearly, he implied, a bulging firefighting force was no longer needed.
Dyer’s and the fire union’s response? They chirped like birds whose nests were being threatened, saying such a cut would compromise public safety.
As the screeching went on, Schulte and James wisely put the ball in Dyer’s court, directing him to come up with his own plan for saving $7.5 million.
Smokey
Dyer, who is nearing 65, has made it clear he wants no part of a significantly trimmed-down department. A City Hall source said Wednesday that Dyer was thought to be close to resigning after Schulte’s and James’ directive that he figure out how to cut more than 100 of the department’s 1,370 positions.
Now, it looks like Smokey has cooled off a bit…enough anyway to hang on until he gets a nice golden parachute. And on Thursday the council accommodated him by approving a retirement incentive package.
The council approved a retirement-policy change that will affect only Dwyer, and perhaps future fire chiefs. Under the change, as reported by The Star’s City Hall reporter, Lynn Horsley, “Dyer would be eligible for an annual pension of about $42,000 if he were to retire soon.”
As it is, the city’s retirement plan is only available to a member of the firefighters’ pension system after 25 years of service. Dyer has been the chief slightly more than 11 years. Previously, he spent 13 years as fire chief in Lee’s Summit before retiring from that city.
I think the ordinance that the council approved is good: A fire chief who has served for at least 10 years, even if he came from another city, should be eligible for a decent pension. Good fire chiefs are hard to find. And, as some council members said, the 25-year-rule could make it difficult to recruit top-notch fire chiefs who did not rise through the KCMO ranks.
The bigger point here, however, is that Smokey seems to have one foot out the door at a time when the department is really going to need some shrewd leadership to help guide it into a time of retrenchment. As Mike Waller, a former Kansas City Star editor, once told me, “It’s easy to manage in good times, when there’s plenty of money, but it’s a lot harder when there are cutbacks.”
Dyer has been very popular with the firefighters and their union, Local 42, because he has been able to help them get big, fat salaries and raises without sacrificing any manpower.
Now, however, Smokey’s and the fire union’s real good thing is about to come to an end.
The city can no longer afford a 1,370-person department where firefighters salaries average $56,000 and they get bigger raises than other city employees.
Something’s got to give: In some way, shape or form, the fire department is going to suffer.
The council has only itself and earlier councils to blame, of course: it was elected council members, worried about running against fire union opposition, who caved in repeatedly to former firefighters’ union president Louie Wright.
In January, The Star’s Yael Abouhalkah said this in a column about Wright’s retirement:
“A big part of the recently retired fire union’s president’s legacy is a bloated Fire Department that costs Kansas Citians at least $10 million more every year than it reasonably should. That’s $10 million going to more than 100 unneeded firefighters. It’s $10 million that could be used on smoother streets, bridge repairs, better park maintenance and new technology to catch tax cheats.”
It’s enough to make you clench your teeth, but it’s hard to bring about real change because Local 42 is so damned powerful politically. They back their candidates with money; they vote; and their families vote. On the other hand, many people who complain about how the special interests get what they want don’t bother to vote and, in many cases, don’t even keep themselves informed on day-to-day developments. In a way, the apathetic get what they deserve.
But enough of that sermon…back to the here and now.
Under new fire union president Mike Cambiano, the firefighters have dug in for this new battle. Horsley reported that several hundred firefighters packed into the City Council Chamber yesterday in support of Dyer and a no-job-cut budget. (Frankly, I don’t know how several hundred firefighters were able to squeeze into the chamber, unless fire regulations were ignored and firefighters were sitting in each other’s laps.)
As this face-off advances, it will be interesting to see just how hard and far James is ready to push against the union. After all, he was elected last year with firefighter union support, and he almost surely will seek re-election in 2015.
At Thursday’s council meeting, he gave an indication of a softening of position.
“We ought to be able to find some ways to make sure we’re not unnecessarily cutting large numbers of firefighters,” he said. “Nobody wants to do that. That’s not palatable. We’ve got to dig beyond the obvious and look at things that are not so obvious.”
We’ll probably end up with some sort of compromise where fewer than 50 firefighting jobs are cut and the budget gurus come up with a “previously unidentified” few million bucks — look what we found! — that makes the union happy. For now.
But by the time that happens, Smokey might have hit the door, or he’ll be mighty close.
JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC 
“When a lovely thing dies, smoke gets in your eyes.” – The Platters (courtesy of Cole Porter). Yeah, there’ll probably be at least one slow dance down at City Hall before all is said and done. Breakin’ up’s hard to do!
What a felicitous analogy, Rick…Thanks for harkening back to one of the greatest oldies of all. And now, readers, for your listening pleasure, it’s The Platters!
Fire and police issues have justifiably dominated the news but what isn’t being talked about is cuts to deferred maintenance, such as street overlays. It’s going to be a bumpy road to austerity.
First, explain to the firefighters that they’re done; not another raise or additional benefit for the next decade, nonnegotiable. After that a joint review of the city’s needs and the FD itself would be done to figure out the next step.
In conjunction with that I would tell Power & Light to go pound sand; no more annual $10-12 mi subsidy from KC. While I was breaking Cordish’s heart I’d also break Mike Sanders’ — the Jackson County Sports Authority would just have to figure out how to do with $1 mil less a year,
Next over to the TIF folks. Those I didn’t actually behead would find themselves out of a job – – no new TIFs would be approved/allowed for a coming decade. Recently let TIF packages would be reviewed and readjusted more favorably for the city.
This not only reduces $10 mil + from the city budget, but thows a crumb or two into the street maintenance pot.
There are a slew of other things but I’m actually working and don’t -at the moment- have the time to do either the city council or the Mayor’s job for them. Should they wish to contract with me to do the obviously overly onerous chore of saying “No!” to people, have them DM me.
My prices are reasonable, though I’ll want the same pension plan ol’ Smokey’s getting.
for the last 35 years the city has cried wolf about money this year the cry is true n when they went out on strike twice nothing was done about except reward them now its time to bite the bullet and they dont want any part of it as far as smokey getting his pension benes i dont think he will get as good of a deal as former city manager aj wilson. instead of giving raises to all employees why dont they apply the money going for raises to the repair of tthe water system and sewer instead of raising rates and putting the senior citizens in a bigger bind with there income
Now City Hall is serving up BS by the truckload. Supply and demand! Less fires, safer buildings, etc = fewer firefighters. Why don’t real world business scenarios apply to union jobs in the public sector?
The whole pension thing is a racket. Let Smokey save, invest and get a 401K like the rest of us. Is he collecting any pension from his previous gig? Please tell me the KCMO pension offer is not one of those California style pensions where Smokey can marry an 18 year old and if he dies on the honeymoon she gets the $42K until SHE dies.
You can’t find one set of balls or half a brain among the mayor and city council. KCMO fiscal planning makes Greece look like the Saudi Kingdom.
The cops and firefighters need to understand who they work for. Neither should be allowed to determine size of force based on one sided or lopsided information from union or public sector cronies, consultants or think tanks. Running a city is a business like any other. There will always be competing needs between sales, marketing, manufacturing, shipping, accounting, IT, blah, blah, blah.
In a business sense the cops and firefighters are the equivalent of security and janitorial. Not big priorities for most businesses. As a pragmatist forget about solving east side crime. Let’s just work on containing it. Let’s require fire sprinklers in all new home construction. Offer incentives to install fire sprinklers in existing homes or remodels. It’s not that hard to do. There’s a lot that we can do as a city and citizens, working together, to reduce the number of coppers and Hy Vee shopping X-Box players on the payroll.
Unions have long outlived their usefullness and altruistic promise to the working class. They are nothing more than puppet organizations of the democrat party passing patronage gonorrhea back and forth to each other every election cycle.
Let me make another prediction. Smokey will get his $42K and then move on down the road to some small corn pone hickvilletopia and get another job as fire chief.
I’m actually sort of a rare bird in the sense that I’m both a former journalist and a former firefighter (and at the same time as that!), but I made very little money in either role. I was a volunteer firefighter in the small SW Missouri community where we had the weekly paper, and at the end of the year (this was in the late ’70s), we got a tiny sum of money for our efforts in the field. And because the paper wasn’t making any money (no grocery advertising), I was essentially a volunteer reporter as well. Firefighting can be dangerous work as we know from the six men who died in that explosion in SE Kansas City in early ’89, I believe it was, and the many who perished in the Twin Towers on 9/11. It would be interesting to know, for comparison’s sake, how the NYC firefighters are compensated relative to the pay the KC firefighters are getting, and a comparison of staffing levels, taking population into consideration, is also in order. So are KC’s taxpayers getting “hosed” here? Who’s to say. With respect to the Power and Light district and many of the TIFs, probably. With respect to Smokey and the gang … maybe. Great balls of fire!
What you ask for around here, in the way of oldies, you get…
Jim, I’ll have to click on those links and see if my computer will let me play the songs, especially the first one. Thanks. Hey, I guess we all need to be watching to see whose pants catch on fire the next time the status of the Fire Department is discussed at City Hall, just like in this new Progressive insurance commercial. “Liar, liar, pants on fire!” Just a thought.
Hey, I clicked on that and enjoyed the nostalgic images from yesteryear that accompany the song. Actually, I think the words go: “When a lovely flame dies, smoke gets in your eyes.” My error.
And now we round out the Top Five “burnin’/smokin” songs of the day…
I wasn’t aware of Arthur Brown’s “Fire,” and for some reason I had completely forgotten about “Light My Fire.” Given the decent wages and benefits KC’s firefighters have enjoyed for a number of years largely due to their union, they should have a-hunk, a-hunk of burnin’ love for the taxpayers.
Gotta agree, Jim, a little spending money is always good when a person is shown the door. It’s the right thing to do, of course.