Greater Harrisburg's Community Magazine

Fire and Ice

 

Mayor Eric Papenfuse, left, and acting fire chief Brian Enterline at Friday's press conference in city hall.

Mayor Eric Papenfuse, left, and acting fire chief Brian Enterline at Friday’s press conference in city hall.

In the wake of this week’s news from Harrisburg’s city hall, about the closing of the Paxton fire station downtown, I found myself thinking of a line from Bill McGraw, a columnist with Deadline Detroit, about how it’s “much easier to manage growth than it is to manage loss or blight.”

McGraw was being quoted in a New Yorker profile of L. Brooks Patterson, the chief executive of Oakland County, a suburb of Detroit that is thriving while its urban neighbor struggles to survive. I thought of the quote because it nicely sums up the challenge facing the chief executive of many American cities, Harrisburg included. Elected officials are subject to the whims of public opinion, which never likes to hear bad news. But they are also constrained by the requirements of governance, which—especially in a period of decline—often means having to deliver it.

On Friday, when Mayor Papenfuse discussed the station closure at a press conference in city hall, it produced a pseudo-scandal. The Paxton station, located on S. 2nd Street, just past the entrance to the city off I-83, is the city’s only downtown fire station. When the former Mayor Linda Thompson tried to close it, in 2010, it created an uproar. Residents of Shipoke, the riverside neighborhood at the city’s southern edge, feared a spike in insurance rates and a loss of necessary protection for their closely-packed homes. Despite this, Papenfuse did not bother to contact Shipoke residents this time around. After the conference, Bill Cluck, an environmentalist and Shipoke resident, told the acting fire chief, Brian Enterline, that he and the mayor had “fucked up” in failing to engage the neighborhood.

There was also a problem of timing. The mayor’s office released the news about the station right on the heels of another major announcement endorsing a charter school and calling for the removal of the school district’s state-appointed recovery officer, Gene Veno. That might have been deliberate obfuscation, or it might have been Papenfuse’s tendency (and, in a certain sense, his campaign promise) to tackle everything at once. Regardless, given the controversy that greeted the last mayor’s effort, the predictable response this week was irritation and distrust.

But ultimately this pseudo-scandal misses the point. Harrisburg firefighters knew in February that the labor concessions they had finally made, after years of unsuccessful negotiations, would lead to some kind of consolidation. Nearly a third of the new agreement’s estimated $1.6 million in savings depended on a reduction in minimum staffing levels. Previously, there were a minimum of 17 firefighters on duty across the city at all times—16 firefighters and one commander, an arrangement often referred to as “16-and-1.” Under the concessions, that number would be reduced to 14 firefighters and one commander, or 14-and-1.

To understand why that two-person reduction, from 16-and-1 to 14-and-1, produced savings of half-a-million dollars, you have to understand a bit about how the fire department mans its stations. A fire department, as a unit of emergency responders, is trickier to staff than other offices: you have to fill the positions 24 hours a day, as well as account for vacation and sick leave, without the force ever falling below the established minimum. To achieve this, of course, the city must hire several times more firefighters than the minimum staffing requirement. According to one formula, devised by Novak, the group that has consulted the city since it entered Act 47, the ideal number of firefighters to achieve 16-and-1 should have been around 86.

What happens if the actual force is smaller than recommended? For much of the past few years, the actual number of city firefighters was well below the ideal; before the most recent hiring of 13 new firefighters, it was in the mid-60s. The city couldn’t leave the stations unmanned, so it scheduled existing firefighters on overtime, at an expensive overtime rate. This circumstance is what produced the eye-popping paychecks to firefighters, which received a fair bit of attention in the press. The city’s 2012 payroll, for example, shows several firefighters essentially taking home a double salary: $60,000 in regular earnings, $60,000 in overtime.

In agreeing to the lower staffing minimum, firefighters basically agreed to work less overtime. (To be fair, they also agreed to work under more difficult conditions. In late January, when a row home on N. 4th Street was firebombed, a lieutenant posted a helmet-cam video of the response crew, along with a comment: “This is a great example of how we are routinely forced to work with low manpower to get the job done.”)

But the concession was only half the battle: the management still had to figure out how to distribute the smaller force across the city’s stations.

This is the point that much of the discussion about last week’s station closure, including at the mayor’s own press conference, completely missed. Papenfuse portrayed closing the Paxton station as a way to save money, but, excepting the costs of maintaining the building, that isn’t exactly true—what will save the city money is the labor concession from February. Closing the Paxton fire station was just one of several ways management could put that concession into practice. And, as the mayor well knew, none of those options would be particularly good news.

The real question to ask about the decision to close the station is whether it was the best of the available options—whether, to return to the McGraw quote above, it made the best of the difficult task of managing a loss.

There is no objective way to answer that question. You can follow the lead of Don Gilliland, writing for the Patriot-News, who implied that the mayor’s decision kept the rest of the city safe by sacrificing Shipoke to the flames. You can take the word of Bill Cluck, the Shipoke resident, who said Friday that his neighborhood would not survive the sort of fires that would have destroyed it completely in earlier years, if not for the fire station in close proximity. Or you can take the word of firefighters themselves, some of whom expressed a feeling of betrayal over the closure. According to Glenn Sattizahn, the president of the local firefighters’ union, closing Paxton station was not part of the negotiations earlier this year, contrary to what Mayor Papenfuse said Friday in city hall. “Consolidating others and keeping that one open was also an option,” Sattizahn said.

Or, alternately, you can take the word of Chief Enterline, who on Friday offered a litany of reasons why, in his belief, the station closure would not compromise public safety: the prevalence of sprinkler-equipped high rises in the downtown area, which reduce risk; the relatively low call rate downtown, compared with the “hot spots” for fire calls Uptown and on Allison Hill; the predicted response times to the Shipoke neighborhood from the remaining stations, as well as the actual response times over the past year, which are both well within the national standard of five minutes. (Sattizahn, for his part, contested Enterline’s claim that the high-rise buildings downtown were really low-risk, pointing to the fire that destroyed the high-rise at One Meridian Plaza in Philadelphia in 1991.)

It would be convenient, I suppose, if the controversy around the Paxton station closure in 2010 were exactly the same as the one in 2014. But in this case, the biggest controversy came and went in February, when the firefighters agreed to a new contract. The mayor’s decision is really about managing the consequences of that agreement, which, because it involves managing a loss, will inevitably produce negative reactions. The best you can hope for from management is that, even in the heat of public opinion, cooler heads will prevail.

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