The San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted Wednesday to strip $6 million out of the department’s budget, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
By cutting $6 million from next year’s budget, the committee made good on a promise to reduce public safety funding to stem cuts to health and human services proposed by Mayor Gavin Newsom. And while the board’s liberal wing has been locked in a months long battle with the powerful firefighters union over anticipated public safety cuts, the supervisors only took one-quarter of the $24 million they had threatened to remove from the Fire Department’s budget earlier this month.
“In Santa Ana, a city of nearly 338,000, the Fire Department has chipped $2.7 million from its $54 million budget, pushing back training, holding vacant firefighting positions open and pulling firefighters from desk jobs and sending them back into the field. Six firefighters scheduled to go to paramedic school next month were told they would have to wait until next year. Overtime is being used to fill in for vacant spots, which saves money in benefits, but consecutive shifts can wear on firefighters. Santa Ana limits its firefighters to working 96 hours in a row,” according to the O.C. Register.
Most of the time our firefighters are used for paramedic services. Can’t we contract more of that out? There are plenty of private paramedic companies that can do this for less. We don’t have wilderness fires in our city. And building fires are pretty rare. So why not cut more from our fire department budget?
Of course this could be a problem for Santa Ana Mayor Miguel Pulido. He gets thousands of dollars every time he runs for office from the Santa Ana Firemen’s union – and they also contribute to all his crooked council members.
You would think that an almost all Democratic City Council that is entirely Latino would do what the San Francisco Board of Supervisors has done – but Pulido and company are Democrats in name only. They will keep nickel and diming residents before they dare cut more from “public safety.”
If you ask me, the city should be doing more to promote its reserve firefighting opportunities. And we ought to be looking at outsourcing to the Orange County Fire Authority. We cannot afford to keep blowing so much of our city budget on one department.
Maybe if the stopped cutting the tree’s in Floral Park they’d have more time to attend to car wrecks (which are far more prevelant than fires).
what is the point of comparing san francisco to santa ana? san francisco cut 2.6% from their budget and based on the OC Register’s numbers (which are on the low side), SAFD cut 5%. so do you think santa ana cut too much? san francisco’s budget is nearly five times that of santa ana. as far as contracting out private medics, why don’t you think anybody else does it? because it has been tried and does not work. one more thing: just because there has been one fire in your neighborhood in the last however many years, you are going to generalize and say that there are never fires in Santa Ana? that is some real responsible fact-based journalism. and by the way, nobody asked you what you thought. if they cared then you would be serving the city as a councilmember and not complaining from the sidelines.
art-
do you have nothing to say for yourself?