Warren budget woes affecting city safety forces

By Ed Runyan

There could be fewer police officers and firefighters in the city next year.

WARREN — Police Chief Tim Bowers said the city “desperately” needs to keep his department at its current staffing level of 61 officers and has urged the city administration to replace three officers retiring by Jan. 1.

Safety-Service Director Doug Franklin, meanwhile, says it’s likely that retirements will result in three to four fewer policemen in 2010 and 10 fewer firefighters unless labor costs are reduced during negotiations or the city secures additional grant money.

“They’re both essential,” Franklin said of the police and fire departments. “We understand the concern about staffing levels.”

But the city needs to cut costs to balance its 2010 budget, and the administration believes leaving vacant positions vacant is one of the ways to do that, Franklin said.

Unfortunately, the city will pay roughly $600,000 in severance costs this year and next to the nine retiring firefighters, which is about $200,000 less than those firefighters would have earned in salary and benefits in 2010 had they kept working, Franklin said.

Ken Nussle, Warren fire chief, said dropping from 60 firefighters to 50 during 2010 would mean his department will have dropped one-third since the start of 2008 — from 75 firefighters to 50.

“It’s frustrating,” Nussle said, adding that there have already been five retirements this year, bringing his current roster to 55. One firefighter left for another job, and four more are expected to retire in the coming months.

Because his number of firefighters continued to fall throughout the year, the department started having trouble meeting its minimum staffing level requirement of 11 per shift.

That meant the department had to pay overtime to guarantee that 11 firefighters were always on duty.

The mayor’s office sent Nussle a letter in July saying the department would no longer have a minimum-staffing level.

Every other fire department in the county with paid firefighters has a minimum-staffing level, Nussle said, and it’s something the Warren Fire Department has had since 1898.

Since the minimum-staffing level was discontinued, the department has fallen to as few as eight firefighters but normally has 10 to 14, Nussle said.

The Niles Fire Department, by comparison, has a minimum-staffing level of six firefighters most of the year and seven during the last two months of the year. Niles’ population is about half of Warren’s.

With eight firefighters on duty, the department can send out two firetrucks with three firefighters on board each one, Nussle said. With 11, it can send three.

When the department had a minimum staffing level of 17 firefighters a couple of years ago, the department had the ability to send four firetrucks, each containing three firefighters, Nussle said.

If a fire requiring three or four trucks were to occur now, firefighters would have to come to work from off duty, and it would take about 15 minutes for those workers to report to the fire station and respond to the emergency, Nussle said.

When the city laid off 11 firefighters Jan. 1 to help eliminate $1.2 million in red ink, Nussle experimented with keeping the East Side and West Side fire houses open differing amounts of time depending on the number of firefighters working on a given day.

But since about April, Nussle and his command staff have concluded that it makes the most sense to keep all firefighters in the main fire station on South Street and leave the two other stations closed, he said.

runyan@vindy.com