Facts Derail Political Wish
To Merge All Fire Districts
There’s an old saying to be careful what you wish for. County Councilman Dan Foust found a magic lamp last year and after a considerable amount of rubbing was able to make a genie appear. The genie was a lot shorter than Dan, didn’t sound at all like Robin Williams or Barbara Eden, and said he wrote for the Post-Dispatch. Together, they were going to make Dan Foust’s fondest wish come true.
It seems Dan felt he had been pushed around on the political playground by some firefighters and now his singular desire was to put all firefighters (and the totally innocent County Ambulance District) under his control. So he wished for an independent commission of citizens to study the consolidation of the fire districts under a countywide umbrella.
Poof! The genie granted Dan his wish. The County Executive appointed an eight member panel to study the idea of merging all of the fire districts in the County. Dan knew it would be only a matter of time and they would endorse his idea.
But like most magical wish stories, the wish maker always seems to fall short of phrasing his wish in just the right way to avoid getting the short end of the stick. In Dan’s case, the short end of the stick was also on fire.
In this case, the commission was chaired by a very capable and honest former public servant, John Hanneke. It’s members represented a cross-section of highly trained professionals and those with business sense.
For months, this dedicated group of individuals volunteered their time to study a very complex issue...one that affects the delivery of crucial public safety services. On the one hand they heard from Dan Foust and his personal genie. All they had to do was merge all the districts, put it under the control of the County and all their problems would be solved. Dan had already gone out and bought himself a fire chief’s hat.
But what the members of the commission were also hearing is that bigger doesn’t mean better. Do the City of St. Louis public schools do a better job than ours because they are a bigger district? How about that bang up job FEMA did?
What the commissioners learned is that response times vary widely in the County. From an average response time of around 3 minutes in the City of St. Charles to as much as 20 minutes in the far rural areas with mainly volunteer firefighters.
If you merged all of the districts there isn’t the promised “economy of scale” that merger proponents thinks there is. Few, if any, fire stations could be closed without significantly increasing response times in the more urban areas like the City of St. Charles. And, if you wanted to improve response times in other parts of the County, you have to build and staff more stations.
It is true that there would be a few less chiefs, but one chief couldn’t cover the entire County without a lot of “assistant” chiefs. And the savings from one or two management positions would be dwarfed by the increased number of paid professional firefighters and paramedics needed to make up for the volunteers still used in some districts.
Merger proponents would argue you could save the cost of expensive fire equipment. But we already have mutual aid between all districts where they help cover each other. Again, the apparatus that is needed in each fire department or district now, would still have to be located in those stations or areas to get to the fires and emergency situations. You can’t say we are only going to have one aerial ladder truck and this week it will be parked in Wentzville and we hope they don’t need it in St. Charles.
So the more the commission learned the less willing they were to endorse a radical plan. They voted 7 to 1 to disband, recommending that the professional Fire Chiefs were capable of working out any additional merger or mutual aid plans. Some mergers may make sense, where the districts are smaller and close together. Lake St. Louis and Wentzville may be prime candidates to start discussions. But there was never anything for the citizens of the City of St. Charles to gain. We already had the best service and don’t have to pay a separate fire district property tax.
Right now our Fire Chief Ernie Rhodes and six of our firefighters are in New Orleans. As of last week they had searched over 300 houses, checking for human remains. They were sloshing through water, if we can still call it that, three feet deep. The smell is excruciating I’m told. They are there as part of a national response plan of mutual aid in such dire emergencies. They all volunteered to go.
This week our firefighters were busy with a storm closer to home. One that took out many beautiful old trees and damaged some homes. In the 5th Ward I‘m told they responded to a home where a tree went through the roof. As the rain poured in, they helped carry the families furniture and possessions downstairs to keep them from further damage.
Not exactly the picture of union thugs we see painted by some.
Dan Foust was so angry that the commission members didn’t endorse his plan that he used up his second wish to have the genie put a curse on them. He’s ready to use his third wish to get the issue placed on the ballot anyway, without a plan. There’s nothing like poor planning when it comes to responding to emergencies. Just ask the residents of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.
And be sure to put more politicians and newspaper columnists in charge. They know a lot more about public safety than people who have dedicated their entire lives to helping others, who train constantly, have degrees in the subject and rose through the ranks based on merit. God forbid we should give them any deference.
Maybe Chief Rhodes and his men will find a magic lamp of their own in the rubble of New Orleans and make a wish that their more vocal critics could slosh around in their boots for even one day.
