Tag Archive for: firefighters union

Questioning the Political Priorities of the Firefighters Union

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As another summer of wildfires approaches, it is in the interest of every Californian to understand that California’s firefighters’ union, the California Professional Firefighters, is one of the most politically powerful unions in the state. This union has the power to help solve the growing problem of wildfires in California, but to more effectively do so they will have to make some tough and selfless political choices.

As it is, California’s firefighters’ union is a partisan political machine that is not standing up to environmental activists that, for decades, have undermined responsible forest management. At the same time, California’s firefighters receive union negotiated pay and benefits that have exempted them from – to use a term favored by the leftists their union aligns with – the “lived experience” of most Californians.

These problems are related. If firefighters received compensation based more on market rates instead of those rates their unions “negotiated” with politicians the unions helped elect, there would be more money to hire more firefighters. There would also be more money left over to spend on programs to prevent wildfires, instead the money running out every year after spending billions to extinguish wildfires.

Before going further, it is important to establish two things: First, to criticize the agenda of public sector unions does not constitute criticism of all unions, in all circumstances. Second, to question whether current pay scales for California’s firefighters are affordable or appropriate in no way diminishes the respect and appreciation we have for their service.

Today the most recent pay and benefits data provided by the State Controller show that the average pay and benefits for a full time firefighter working for a city in California in 2020 was $256,000. That’s a 24 percent increase in just two years. Note that this average includes administrative and other non first responders that work for these fire departments but make far less, which pulls down the numbers. Among cities that included the back payments to restore solvency to their pension plans as compensation, Santa Clara in 2020 was the city with the highest average pay and benefits for their full time fire department personnel, at $352,000.

These amounts are mind-boggling. The average base salary of a full-time fire department employee in a California city in 2020 was $115,000. To put this in perspective, according to Military.com, a staff sergeant with 10 years experience in the U.S. Army in 2020 earned base pay of $42,000. An Army captain with 10 years experience earned $79,000. Similar rates of pay apply across the U.S. Military. When it comes to including compensation apart from base pay, the disparity between California’s city firefighters and members of the military remains striking. According to a 2021 report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the total cost to the Department of Defense per service member averages $140,000 per year. This is only 55 percent of what it costs to taxpayers in California’s cities to pay their firefighters.

It’s easy enough to say cities with high tax bases like Manhattan Beach or Santa Clara have the financial wherewithal to pay their firefighters whatever they ask. But massive compensation packages for firefighters have financially strapped other cities, such as Placentia that had to completely restructure their fire department in order to get their budget under control. But either way, excessive and unaffordable pay and benefits for California’s unionized firefighters is only half the problem. 

The lesser known fact about California firefighters unions is that the union is not apolitical, but instead, like other public unions in the state, firmly entrenched in progressive politics. The firefighters union backed Prop. 15 in 2020, which would have caused business properties to be reassessed at market rates, eliminating one of the last advantages private businesses have in California. This is also the union that marched with the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) in 2019 (pre-COVID), a teachers union that is aggressively pushing to serve up a hard-left program of indoctrination in the already failing public schools of Los Angeles. 

The California Professional Firefighters union engages in politics with an extraordinary degree of political and financial power. A few years ago when asked, off the record, why a Southern California businessman running for city council took campaign contributions from the firefighters union, his response was compelling. “They are either going to spend a million bucks to elect me, or they are going to spend it to elect my opponent.” The financial power of California’s public sector unions is well documented. 

A Tremendous Opportunity

Putting an end to cataclysmic wildfires, which are the result of decades of bad policies, ought to be the top political priority of the firefighters union. But if you visit the California Professional Firefighters website, you can easily find a press release from a few years ago, titled “CPF President Praises Newsom Commitment to Wildfire Response and Prevention.” Newsom does not deserve this praise. Almost all of Newsom’s significant actions are oriented to wildfire response, not wildfire prevention. Here’s what the firefighters union can do that might, within a few years, solve the problem of super fires, and earn the admiration and gratitude of millions of Californians:

(1) Take a public stand that policies and spending on wildfire prevention is as important as wildfire response.

(2) Demand legislative and legal action to streamline the process for property managers and property owners to engage in controlled burns.

(3) Partner with the logging industry to restore responsible logging with a goal of doubling or tripling the annual timber harvest in California. The state’s timber harvest has been reduced to 25 percent of what was being removed in the 1990s.

(4) Publicize and advocate for the successful “uneven-aged” forest management and total ecosystem management practices that saved Shaver Lake’s forests in 2020, and the forests around South Lake Tahoe in 2021.

(5) Aggressively challenge and help defend against the environmentalist litigators and lobbyists that have prevented responsible forest management and allowed California’s forests to turn into tinder boxes.

(6) Politely, but publicly and unequivocally challenge attention grabbing wildfire-inspired stunts, such as new Electric Vehicle mandates, as deflecting from the necessary solutions involving forestry management.

In addition to saving forests, homes and lives by preventing fires, reforming the state’s forest management policies would create new jobs in the timber industry, lower the cost of lumber for home construction, and save billions spent on the fire lines each summer.

One thing the firefighters union is very good at is winning. By using its political power to back critical fire prevention efforts, the firefighters union would score a huge win for all Californians.

This article originally appeared on the website of the California Globe.

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Firefighters Union Backs Prop. 15 Instead of Forestry Reform

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Thousands of firefighters continue to battle blazes across California. In Orange County, two firefighters are in critical condition after suffering major injuries battling the Silverado Fire. Every year around this time, firefighters risk their lives, and some of them lose their lives, protecting the rest of us from these catastrophic fires.

Deep respect for what firefighters do, however, cannot excuse us of our obligation to criticize the political agenda of the firefighters union. Moreover, it is likely that if the firefighter union leadership redirected their political priorities, it would save lives and property. It would free up firefighting resources, allowing them to be concentrated in remaining trouble spots.

In this fraught political season, California’s firefighters union has decided to endorse Prop. 15, the controversial “split roll” ballot initiative. If enacted, Prop. 15 will require business properties to be reassessed at market rates. If passed, the increased tax revenue is estimated at between $6.5 billion and $11.5 billion per year.

It isn’t necessary to debate the pros and cons of Prop. 15 here. Nor is it necessary to recap why it is the mission of every public sector union in California to increase taxes, despite the fact that Californians already pay the highest overall taxes in the United States.

Most everyone agrees that if you are a victim of a fire, or are injured or killed fighting a fire, no amount of monetary compensation is adequate. But that perspective, which reasonable people acknowledge, has a corollary: If no amount of compensation is adequate, the limits of compensation should be governed by what is affordable.

Here, using 2019 data provided by the California State Controller, is what full time firefighters earn in pay and benefits. These numbers represent the average, the median numbers are even higher. And except in the data for CalFire pensions, these numbers do not include the individual cost of reducing unfunded pension liabilities, or prefunding retirement health benefits. Therefore these averages understate the true cost to taxpayers to pay California’s firefighters.

Notwithstanding the hypocritical nonsense about “closing corporate loopholes” and making “making rich corporations pay their fair share,” one widely broadcast television ad promoting Prop. 15 has a firefighter saying “to fight these fires, we need funding, plain and simple.”

That’s true, of course. And it will always be true, no matter how much money is forthcoming. Because public safety resources cannot possibly be permanently scaled to adequately address truly catastrophic wildfires. Instead, more effective methods of prevention – not just fire suppression – have to be reintroduced.

The Firefighters Union Needs to Stand Up to the Environmentalist Lobby

Debating whether or not full time firefighters should earn well over $200,000 per year, much less reducing it somewhat, may be a futile exercise. The firefighters union, like all public sector unions, exercises political control through campaign contributions. Politicians who are willing to tell a firefighter they make too much money are few and far between. As for convincing firefighters to quit their unions and thus defund them? Yeah, right. Quit a union that is the sole reason you’re making nearly a quarter million per year? Fat chance.

There’s another path, difficult to articulate because it might be interpreted as tacit acceptance of the legitimacy of public sector unions. But that’s a false choice. Public sector unions are an abomination. They have corrupted democracy, allowing government employees to run the government. They should be illegal and disbanded. Voluntary associations of government employees that have no collective bargaining power would be more than adequate to represent the interests of public sector workers. Laws governing all employees, public and private, would guarantee their rights as workers.

In the meantime, while we await a miracle, it still might be productive to suggest the firefighters union use some of their considerable influence to advocate something besides merely raising taxes and increasing their pay and benefits. And precedents for this have been set. In early 2019, the firefighters union marched with the United Teachers of Los Angeles, in a show of leftist solidarity that has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with fighting fires.

Firefighters belonging to unions ought to question these political priorities. Because the Californian Left may wield nearly all political power in California, but they do so with the consent of public sector unions. And this monolithic Left includes the environmentalist lobby that has all but destroyed the timber industry in California. And the timber industry, properly regulated, could profitably thin California’s conifer forests.

In 1950, nearly 6 billion board feet of timber was harvested out of California’s forests. In 2020, that harvest is down to 1.5 billion board feet. If California’s politicians were committed to lobbying and legislating for new state and federal laws that brought California’s timber industry back up to an annual harvest of 4 billion board feet, much of the super fires that have devastated towns, wildlife, watersheds, and cost lives, would become a thing of the past.

This is proven by the example of Shaver Lake, where 20,000 acres of forest managed by Southern California Edison stayed intact, even as the Creek Fire surrounded and destroyed everything around it. Logging, thinning, and controlled burns (only possible after logging and thinning), are the reason those trees survived. By restoring a timber industry in California, much of the resources necessary to fight fires in conifer forests could be redirected towards controlling fires in chaparral.

Forestry reform has many productive aspects. Along with expanding the timber industry, reintroduce cattle grazing in appropriate areas. Expand California’s network of biomass energy facilities, something that could fund forest and chaparral thinning with ratepayer funded subsidies that are often less than what other forms of renewable energy are costing consumers. But all of this requires standing up to an environmentalist lobby that thrives and profits off conflict rather than solutions.

Everyone is grateful to firefighters for the work they do. But their union needs to decide. Along with fighting for more pay and benefits for their members, are they going to remain an ancillary wing of California’s leftist ruling class? Or will they pick one fight where they defy the conventional wisdom, and perhaps provide the tipping point to change it?

Will California’s firefighting unions fight to reform California’s forest management laws and regulations? That would take almost as much courage as fighting forest fires. And it would help everyone and everything – people, trees, wildlife, the economy, and the tax base.

This article originally appeared on the website California Globe.

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