The Politics of Fire: Ann Arbor Fire Fighters’ Union Goes on the PR Offensive

John Hieftje and City Administrator Roger Fraser are both fond of pointing out that the Ann Arbor Fire Department is, practically, obsolete. Fraser, in describing what the AAFD does has said, “They have very few fires. Mostly what they deal with is EMS and car crashes.”

This, of course, is an outright distortion of the truth. It also overlooks the fact that a fire department is an insurance policy.

Fraser’s logic, applied to health insurance, would get him laughed out of the room. “You have very few heart attacks. Mostly what you deal with are colds and flu. You don’t need health insurance.” So go ahead, cut your coverage. Better yet, up the deductible to, say, $5,000. Sound good? That’s Roger Fraser’s recommendation, while he enjoys better-than-average insurance coverage, is the highest paid staffer at City Hall, and one time tried to make himself the Fire Chief, only to be told by the county attorney that he was making what amounted to an illegal power grab.

John Hieftje on fire service is no better. He will sing, dance and distort the truth. He’ll tell you that cuts are fine because the fire fighters “rarely hook up to hydrants.” Another distortion of the truth. He sat by while the former Fire Chief Lanza lied about the impact of cuts to the Fire Department in 2010. If Hieftje didn’t know Dominick Lanza had been told to lie, I’d be shocked. Hieftje asked Lanza the question about city coverage and response times that the Chief went on to answer untruthfully, but only after a long pause.

The AAFD union believes there are more cuts coming, perhaps even station closures, despite Lanza’s recent mea culpa confession that he had not told the truth when asked if cuts would adversely impact citizen safety and services. In an unprecedented move, the firefighters are going on offense. They’re hoping, one imagines, to get a discussion started about what would happen if more cuts were made. They’re doing it before City Council members sit down to vote on the budget. It’s not hard to understand why.

When former Fire Chief Lanza finally came clean about the fact that the AAFD is already understaffed, Council member Sabra Briere told the Press she felt like she’d been “told the truth.”

Briere went on to say, “What I haven’t heard from anybody on staff is anything positive about the other side. I never heard it from the fire chief, I never heard it from the chief of police, I never heard it from anybody in HR. What I’m seeing is that there’s a discouragement of information flow to council perhaps.”

This was ridiculous politibabble. Briere (and the rest of Council) heard “it” directly from the firefighters in May 2010 and, unfortunately, never bothered to try to reconcile the discrepancies between what the City Administrator and Fire Chief were telling Council concerning the potential impacts of the cuts, and what the firefighter’s union was telling Council concerning the fact that fire service in Ann Arbor was jeopardized in 2010.

Briere made her comments 18 months after she’d voted to make cuts in fire protection based on Lanza’s lie and despite the former Chief’s contradiction of his own firefighters who stood, one-after-another, before Council and told Briere and her colleagues that any further cuts would be unwise, perhaps catastrophic. (This is what Lanza wrote in a letter he sent to Council in March 2011, one month after he resigned for “family reasons.”)

On April 8, 2011 members of IAFF Local 1693 posted a video to YouTube that refutes Fraser’s glib summation of what the city’s fire fighters do, and presents a sobering retrospective of several recent fires in which there was loss of life. In one of the fires in which a garage burned to the ground, the video notes, there was a closed fire station not more than one-quarter of a mile away.

The truth is that John Hieftje, Roger Fraser and City Council are gambling with our public safety in order to build an underground parking garage we don’t need, and a City Hall that is so over-sized, over-budget and expensive that Roger Fraser recently suggested to Council that the city should dump the 15th District Court and sublet 50,000 square feet of the 100,000 sqaure foot building to save money. Hieftje unsuccessfully tried to muscle the Downtown Development Authority into moving into the new Police-Court building to bring in a little extra cash. The DDA Board voted Hieftje’s proposal down.

Meanwhile, to make the payments on the half a billion dollars of debt accumulated in just six years, Roger Fraser, John Hieftje and City Council members may, once again, try to find savings the last place that should be cut.

You can watch the IAFF’s video below.