Firefighters – The Burning Platform

Nothing like spending 99% of your career siting around a firehouse playing cards and eating lobster and steak on the taxpayer, while getting paid $190,000 per year, retiring at 50 years old at full salary, and acting like you deserve it. This is the kind of shit that will not continue. There will be no tears shed when greedy government union drones lose their sweet salaries, benefits and pensions. The unsustainable will not be sustainable.

Via Public Sector Inc.

Firefighter pay shows why San Bernardino is bankrupt

Steven Greenhut June 24, 2014 Pensions

San Bernardino is a poor city about 50 miles east of Los Angeles in the Inland Empire — a place where a $50,000 salary would be typical and where home prices are nowhere near what they are in fancier areas of coastal Southern California. Yet the bankrupt city is trying desperately to unload some of its outlandish contracts with public employees, especially with the firefighters’ union. “San Bernardino, California, said that to exit bankruptcy it must terminate a union contract that pays an average annual salary of $190,000 to each of its top 40 firefighters,” according to an article in Bloomberg. That’s just salary. Firefighters receive the generous “3 percent at 50″ retirement package that allows them to retire with 90 percent of their final years’ pay at age 50. And there are lots of pension-spiking gimmicks and other benefits on top of that.

native advertising

As the article notes, because of a voter initiative it may not be legal to dump those contracts. And I’ve looked at a city salary schedule, and the salaries are almost unbelievable throughout the city. City officials blame the economic downturn and the popping real-estate bubble for their financial plight. But that’s like saying that a salary cutback is the cause of an individual’s personal bankruptcy — never mind the Maserati in the garage, the trips to Hawaii, the diamond rings and the $200 nightly bottles of wine.

San Bernardino is in a financial fix that other California cities have mostly avoided, but the level of public-employee enrichment there is typical. These cities are run for the benefit of those who work there. Public services are a side matter at best. Two-thirds of the nation’s firefighters do this job for free, as volunteers. In what world is making them millionaires (when you add in their retirement benefits) a sensible idea? As usual, the city’s residents will pay the price in the form of reduced services. In Stockton and Vallejo, where similar salaries are common, residents also got hit with increased taxes. There’s something vulgar about hitting poor residents with higher taxes to pay for the city’s wealthy elite. And I hear no progressive voices complaining.

About Steven Greenhut

Steven Greenhut is the California columnist for U-T San Diego. Greenhut formerly was vice president of journalism at the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, where he managed a team of 35 investigative reporters and editors who covered state capitols across the country. He founded CalWatchdog in 2009, which provided Sacramento-based investigative news coverage and he writes regularly for publications including Reason, Human Events, Bloomberg and City Journal. He is author of the 2009 book, “Plunder! How Public Employee Unions Are Raiding Treasuries, Controlling Our Lives And Bankrupting the Nation” and the 2005 book, “Abuse of Power: How the Government Misuses Eminent Domain.” View all posts by Steven Greenhut →

I was watching some new sitcom last night that takes place in a NYC bar. A bunch of NYFD dudes came into the bar and women swarmed around these heroes. One of the skeptical characters in the show walked up to them and pointed out the number of fires in this country were 85% lower than 50 years ago. He told them he had likely put out as many fires as they had in the last year. They got bent out of shape by him using facts to pop their hero balloon. Later in the show he told them rain could do their job.

The episode made me curious and lo and behold checkout this chart. Thirty five years ago we needed 225,000 career fire fighters to handle 2.4 million fires. Today, with much better equipment and technology, we somehow need 340,000 career fire fighters to handle 1.37 million fires. That’s 50% more firefighters for 40% less fires. I smell something and it’s not smoke. It’s the stench of another government union scam.

The government and the firefighters’ unions know these drones sit around the firehouse 99.8% of the time collecting high pay, gold plated benefits and retirement with full pay at 50 years old. They get more false alarms than actual fire calls. There was only one way to pretend they are useful and needed. Whenever an ambulance call comes in they send a fire truck just for shits and giggles. You’ve all seen fire trucks at the scenes of minor car accidents or other medical emergencies. Whenever you see six firefighters standing around at a fender bender accident scene remember that it costs you the taxpayer approximately $3,500 every time a fire engine leaves the station.