Latest / B Shifter / Politics, Labor Relations & the Fire Department

Transcript

Politics, Labor Relations & the Fire Department · B Shifter

• 0:52
  Speaker 1: We want to welcome you to the B-Shifter podcast.
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: John Vance here along with Nick Brunicini and just the two of us hanging out today catching up seeing what's going on.
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: We just wrapped up our conference in Cincinnati Ohio.
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: How was that for you?
• 1:11
  Speaker 2: It was good.
• 1:12
  Speaker 2: It was a little different this year.
• 1:15
  Speaker 2: We did like pre-conference stuff, so you had a three-day cert lab in the front of it, the biggest two-day May Day workshop we've ever done.
• 1:25
  Speaker 2: There was almost 100 people there for that and then it spilled into the main conference and it all went very well.
• 1:31
  Speaker 2: It was what did?
• 1:32
  Speaker 2: We have two dozen people presenting, probably, so you had a lot of different topics.
• 1:38
  Speaker 2: Most everybody there had a good time.
• 1:41
  Speaker 2: They were all very enthusiastic about the different workshops that they could go to, so it was good.
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: I caught your class, the Silverback class, the intro to Silverback leadership, setting the stage really.
• 1:57
  Speaker 2: Yeah, we started putting it together Last year.
• 1:59
  Speaker 2: We gave an overview of what the whole program is going to look like and then this year I thought, well, you know, instead of doing the next module in this, it would probably be more interesting to tell the story of where this came from.
• 2:11
  Speaker 2: So that was something that happened way back when in Phoenix, a million years ago, a lot of fire departments would come to Phoenix because of the labor management relationship between the administration and the union and so the RBO and all the magic dust, and they'd go and spend a weekend with the group and then they'd go back home and try to implement all the stuff and none of them and I mean I don't know of one that had very much success doing it.
• 2:46
  Speaker 2: And they all kind of said the same thing as we go back home and we try to do it, and then we would all just kind of revert back to our old roles with each other.
• 2:54
  Speaker 2: You know they would fight about this and we couldn't do this.
• 2:57
  Speaker 2: And you're like, well, yeah, that's you guys, it's the two guys in Phoenix who started it all had, like this history that kind of played out, and that was the strength of it, was the relationship they had going in, because they basically trusted each other and really the system was not so much for them but for everybody who worked for them.
• 3:20
  Speaker 2: So it was like, no, we're going to get along, and then everybody who works in this thing is going to do the same thing and off you go.
• 3:27
  Speaker 2: So I thought, I thought that would serve people better than okay, this is the work, is the next module in this and it unites and binds us in here.
• 3:36
  Speaker 2: Yeah, of course it does.
• 3:38
  Speaker 2: No, it doesn't, cause you look at all the dysfunction with all the work we do in the fire service and it's still doing what it's doing.
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: Well, we had lunch today with someone from a major metropolitan fire department who was talking about how they even wanted to replace the patch and the seats, because oh, the old chief wore that patch, we have to get rid of it.
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: Oh, the old chief sat in the seat, we have to throw it away.
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, it's almost like you're in a very good relationship.
• 4:06
  Speaker 2: No, you can't.
• 4:06
  Speaker 2: You're cannibalizing yourself.
• 4:10
  Speaker 2: I lived through a transition of basically worked for one fire chief for most of my career and then the last three years of my career, I worked for the next fire chief.
• 4:23
  Speaker 2: Well, that was a political succession also.
• 4:26
  Speaker 2: So when you do a political succession for the fire chief, that's a political process.
• 4:33
  Speaker 2: Well, when you look at politics today, no one loses the political process and sticks around.
• 4:41
  Speaker 2: They execute them, they're gone right.
• 4:43
  Speaker 2: I mean that's why it's so screwed up today the polarization of you know this is my political view.
• 4:49
  Speaker 2: Well, you know, good for you.
• 4:51
  Speaker 2: So I think fire departments are no different as they do.
• 4:57
  Speaker 2: Okay, the old chief's leaving and now we're in charge now, and that's kind of the deal.
• 5:01
  Speaker 2: She's leaving and now we're in charge now, and that's kind of the deal, we're in charge.
• 5:06
  Speaker 2: You're like, well, what are you here to do?
• 5:08
  Speaker 2: You're here to go on call, so you're really not in charge.
• 5:13
  Speaker 2: It's the people who run the fire, the people who pay for the fire department are the customers who get the service.
• 5:19
  Speaker 2: So you got this thing turns it on its head.
• 5:22
  Speaker 2: That's what happens.
• 5:24
  Speaker 2: Like, when you listen to Garrison, it's like he'll.
• 5:26
  Speaker 2: A lot of the time he has more of a confrontational role with the people.
• 5:32
  Speaker 2: He's with the authority having jurisdiction, because he's never viewed them as his boss.
• 5:38
  Speaker 2: It's like no, I'm here to run the fire department, and that involves doing the best service we can for the customer and then taking care of the firefighters, because they do the actual work.
• 5:48
  Speaker 2: Well, no, I'm the mayor and I'm like the king of the community because I'm the elected official for the next four years.
• 5:55
  Speaker 2: No, you're just the idiot that most people voted for for this four years.
• 6:02
  Speaker 2: You're nothing special.
• 6:03
  Speaker 2: In fact, the fire chief should know more about running the fire department than the mayor does.
• 6:07
  Speaker 2: So and you get real problems when the mayor, or whoever the AHJ is, wants to start actually running the fire department.
• 6:17
  Speaker 2: That completely screws it up.
• 6:18
  Speaker 2: And I've seen that as we had a fire chief who said, no, we're going to run it this way, and then the next group of fire chiefs says, oh, no, I work for the mayor, it's that.
• 6:26
  Speaker 2: Well, we're screwed then because nobody's working for us up at the top and you could see in the fire department suffered.
• 6:32
  Speaker 2: It's like well, no, the mayor needs this, and you're like the mayor's a political person, they're not going to be here.
• 6:38
  Speaker 2: They're not the boss, they're in charge, they're the mayor, but and I even fire and the fire chief is tough for the mayor in a lot of places they can do it, but it's.
• 6:52
  Speaker 2: I saw a deal the other day where a guy just quit and it's because he wasn't going to do some staffing stuff.
• 6:59
  Speaker 2: As you read the report and like there was a big teary separation, he's like no, I love you all, but I just can't do this in good conscience.
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: Yeah, they were at.
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: It was after the voters approved a measure that was going to give them additional firefighters, and that was.
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: He went out and campaigned for it.
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: Hey, if you vote for this, this is the level of service and in the time that, uh, between that passing and the budget got approved, the budget got so hacked up that he was going to have to start to eliminate some of those new positions.
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: And he just wasn't going to do it.
• 7:30
  Speaker 3: He couldn't in good consciousness.
• 7:31
  Speaker 3: I come to you with a full heart, with no malice and no ill will.
• 7:34
  Speaker 3: I have to make a decision to cut services.
• 7:39
  Speaker 3: Last March, the taxpayers approved 13 firefighters across the four fire battalions at 70% of the vote, and, to quote a mentor of mine, tony DeFrancesco, that is a report card to determine how a fire department or town is doing, and the community turned out, because they listened, they wanted 13.
• 8:03
  Speaker 3: Because the way my budget is trending right now, given circumstances that are outside of my control, I'm flying through those monies appropriated by the taxpayers.
• 8:14
  Speaker 3: So I've come to an inflection point.
• 8:16
  Speaker 3: I have a decision to make.
• 8:17
  Speaker 3: The decision is to cut services from 13, 12, down to 11, although the community told me they want 13, or not execute what I have to do as a fire chief because of my budget obligations Ten times out of ten.
• 8:35
  Speaker 3: The man standing in front of you will always prioritize people and health and safety and my role as chief of the department, my people and we the people, over any type of monetary value period.
• 8:51
  Speaker 3: End of story.
• 8:51
  Speaker 3: So then I'm forced to make a decision whether I acquiesce or capitulate to what I believe in my heart is the best thing for this community, and in doing so, we'll put the council and my boss, town manager Mike Maliguti, in a position, if I go over budget, where another hard decision has to be made.
• 9:11
  Speaker 3: There are things worth fighting for still in this country for sure that I believe in with all my heart and all my soul, which allows me to execute the way I'm going to execute in this instance.
• 9:32
  Speaker 3: I stood before you on September 11th 2023, and I told you that firefighters would always come first.
• 9:37
  Speaker 3: Firefighters first mission always is what I said.
• 9:41
  Speaker 3: First mission always is what I said, and I meant that when my firefighters are taken care of and when they're staffed at the level the community told me they wanted to be staffed at, and I can't do that for the firefighters in the community.
• 9:56
  Speaker 3: That's a problem for me.
• 9:58
  Speaker 3: So it's not that I can't give the order to drop services, but I won't give the order.
• 10:06
  Speaker 2: The article I read.
• 10:07
  Speaker 2: The mayor was very upset with that.
• 10:09
  Speaker 2: This even came out and he says, no, this isn't what happened and this isn't true.
• 10:13
  Speaker 2: And you're like, yeah, I know what happened.
• 10:14
  Speaker 2: It's they voted for this, you got the money and you're going to spend it on something else now and I'm sick of you overspending because of this, this staffing thing I have to do, and that really comes down to it.
• 10:26
  Speaker 2: It's just, these people come into power and it's like, well, I need this much money.
• 10:34
  Speaker 2: Well, you can't, because you got to spend this much over here with the fire department on staffing.
• 10:36
  Speaker 2: You know we have to have this constant staffing thing.
• 10:38
  Speaker 2: Well, that's, it automatically turns a lot of of people with accounting backgrounds against the fire service.
• 10:46
  Speaker 2: Why are you doing this?
• 10:47
  Speaker 2: Well, because the brain dies in four to six minutes is why we do it.
• 10:53
  Speaker 2: Well, what's that have to do with anything?
• 10:57
  Speaker 2: Well, that's kind of EMS is based on getting there between four to six minutes.
• 11:02
  Speaker 2: You have to have qualified people and then any kind of hazard zone thing and you could just kind of triple it because we're doing it as companies.
• 11:11
  Speaker 2: So that's what it looks like.
• 11:12
  Speaker 2: Pal Marinucci was one of the best people for that that I listened to and he would tell his bosses well, what kind of fire department do you want?
• 11:19
  Speaker 2: Do you want an A fire department, a B fire department, a C, a D or an F?
• 11:23
  Speaker 2: He says, because what you're giving me, you're getting a D.
• 11:26
  Speaker 2: That's the level of service you want.
• 11:28
  Speaker 2: Well, no, the voters don't want that.
• 11:31
  Speaker 2: Well, of course they don't, but you do, so that's how you're funding it.
• 11:36
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm sorry, but this is what it costs to run a fire department.
• 11:40
  Speaker 2: It's an expensive thing and it's.
• 11:42
  Speaker 2: I mean, there's ways to reduce that and that was kind of part of our thing at the conference where we talked about.
• 11:49
  Speaker 2: It is is the fire chief and the union president had a very unique relationship with each other and they kind of they formulated that relationship around the work they were supposed to do.
• 12:05
  Speaker 2: So the entire time that Alan Brunicini was the fire chief, he did not spend one penny on lawyers processing any personnel issue with the union.
• 12:18
  Speaker 2: There was never any grievance with the union.
• 12:20
  Speaker 2: So the union spent zero dollars, as did the fire chief, on lawyers to sue each other.
• 12:27
  Speaker 2: Now they're being sued by other people and suing other people, but not one another.
• 12:32
  Speaker 2: So what they could do is when they figured out okay, we're friends and this is the way it's going to work, then they got whatever they wanted work.
• 12:41
  Speaker 2: Then they got whatever they wanted.
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: So you talked about management by objective relationship by objective RBO.
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: How did that set up?
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: Where did that all begin?
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: And define that for people?
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: Because we had some discussions at the conference about that, because that was a new concept to some people.
• 13:01
  Speaker 2: RBO or relationships by objectives, was made by some academic person that was working with the federal government on some project, and I don't remember the details about it.
• 13:11
  Speaker 2: But and based on what had happened between the like in the fire department early in 1980, in the fire department early in 1980.
• 13:26
  Speaker 2: Basically, the city came after the union president because he was going after he was changing the way we elect politicians in the city of Phoenix to govern.
• 13:36
  Speaker 2: And he did.
• 13:36
  Speaker 2: They did a proposition and they got it passed in 1982.
• 13:42
  Speaker 2: And it basically replaced the entire city council and mayor, passed in 1982, and it basically replaced the entire city council and mayor.
• 13:47
  Speaker 2: So they're coming after him and they fabricated a bunch of nonsense, legal stuff, and arrested him and it was a big public spectacle.
• 13:52
  Speaker 2: Well, the fire chief put the union president back to work once he passed the lie detector.
• 13:56
  Speaker 2: So then they go after the fire chief and say you know you were supposed to assassinate this asshole for us and you didn't, and so we're going to do X, y and Z.
• 14:03
  Speaker 2: So, long story short, 1982 comes around.
• 14:08
  Speaker 2: The union president was never done anything.
• 14:11
  Speaker 2: He was never given any kind of discipline or punishment, because he was arrested for a false felony that the city made up.
• 14:21
  Speaker 2: So he sticks around.
• 14:22
  Speaker 2: The fire chief sticks around.
• 14:24
  Speaker 2: Well, two, three years later, there's a new mayor and a new council.
• 14:27
  Speaker 2: Well, the union president got them all elected.
• 14:30
  Speaker 2: So that changed the dynamic.
• 14:33
  Speaker 2: So, three years before, they wanted to kill him.
• 14:36
  Speaker 2: Now, three years later, they all owe their careers to him because he got all that changed.
• 14:41
  Speaker 2: Well, the fire chief threw in with the union president right away and said no, we're working for the fire department, we're doing this together, and I know what they're doing to you and it's bullshit and I'm not going to.
• 14:54
  Speaker 2: I'm going to do what I can to keep this fair.
• 14:56
  Speaker 2: So that's what happened.
• 14:59
  Speaker 2: Well, when they come out of the woods together is the two of them figure out.
• 15:04
  Speaker 2: We have to have some kind of formal relationship.
• 15:08
  Speaker 2: You and I are good, but we got a broker everybody around us that fills out the rest of the roundtable, if you will.
• 15:16
  Speaker 2: So essentially, what happened is we went to a pure district system where you elected one city council person for your district instead of all eight of them.
• 15:26
  Speaker 2: So that flipped the whole city upside down.
• 15:28
  Speaker 2: So, really, phoenix went from what you would call a red city to a purple city.
• 15:33
  Speaker 2: Well, phoenix became blue then it always was.
• 15:36
  Speaker 2: It's just that the political system matched the people that lived there, which is true in most of America.
• 15:42
  Speaker 2: Densely populated places tend to be more liberal because there's more people living together and have to kind of put up with one another, so we tend to give each other a little more running room.
• 15:52
  Speaker 2: I guess I don't know whatever the reason, but that's what happened.
• 15:54
  Speaker 2: So the two of them hook up with this federal mediator who's invented RBO relationships by objectives.
• 16:05
  Speaker 2: So now what we're going to do is really what that means is we're going to manage this organization around the work you do.
• 16:11
  Speaker 2: That's what the objective is.
• 16:12
  Speaker 2: The objective is the work.
• 16:14
  Speaker 2: Is it service delivery, as we go out and deliver service the fire department?
• 16:20
  Speaker 2: What I figured out in the last 45 years is what we do.
• 16:23
  Speaker 2: Is we de-escalate shit.
• 16:24
  Speaker 2: There's some catastrophe happening in the city and they call us, and whether it's medical or fire, hazardous materials, whatever it is, is we show up and we figure out okay, how do we return things to normal?
• 16:36
  Speaker 2: How do we de-escalate this hazard that the citizens are facing, whether it's internal for one person having a heart attack, or there's a big building on fire that's threatening a bunch of houses.
• 16:46
  Speaker 2: So that's what we do.
• 16:49
  Speaker 2: So the union president figures out.
• 16:53
  Speaker 2: The fire chief is like the authority on this, on doing the work.
• 16:56
  Speaker 2: He's written all the standards.
• 16:58
  Speaker 2: In fact my boss in the IFF is his best friend.
• 17:03
  Speaker 2: So now you've got the small chapter meets the big chapter.
• 17:08
  Speaker 2: And now you've got a strange organization afloat.
• 17:12
  Speaker 2: You've got Alan Brunicini, al Whitehead, pat Cantelmi, vinnie Bolin, a bunch of other lunatics that are like firefighter people that say no, this is what the fire service needs to do to go to the next level and do what its mission is in the future with modern technology.
• 17:28
  Speaker 2: So they get together and they do this RBO thing, and that's what it was.
• 17:33
  Speaker 2: And so the fire department reorganized around the districts.
• 17:38
  Speaker 2: So we went from battalions to districts essentially Big deal.
• 17:43
  Speaker 2: But we had five major divisions or sections within the fire department.
• 17:48
  Speaker 2: You know operations, training, logistics, admin, all the standard stuff you have.
• 17:53
  Speaker 2: Well, the union structured themselves the same way.
• 17:56
  Speaker 2: So now you've got a fire chief with five assistant chiefs.
• 18:01
  Speaker 2: You have a union president with five vice presidents.
• 18:04
  Speaker 2: So they made these committees for each one of the sections.
• 18:08
  Speaker 2: So, like the operations section was the deployment committee.
• 18:13
  Speaker 2: So any deployment issue, which is pretty much anything that you would dispatch a call is deployment.
• 18:19
  Speaker 2: So any kind of customer service request went through the deployment committee.
• 18:23
  Speaker 2: So any kind of customer service request went through the deployment committee.
• 18:25
  Speaker 2: Well, you had the assistant chief of operations and then the vice president.
• 18:28
  Speaker 2: Some vice president of the union was his counterpart on the committee.
• 18:32
  Speaker 2: So those two were the chairs.
• 18:34
  Speaker 2: And then, like as a BC, you had to go to all the deployment committee meetings and they had them once a quarter so, and you would go and they talk about deployment stuff.
• 18:43
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so they did it the same for all five sections.
• 18:47
  Speaker 2: And then once a year you would go and have a labor management retreat where they would take two days and essentially it was just like quarterly reports on steroids.
• 18:56
  Speaker 2: They would talk about OK, this is what we did last year, here's all of last year's goals and what we wanted to get done, here's where we are with that.
• 19:04
  Speaker 2: So that's the first day.
• 19:05
  Speaker 2: Then the second day it's like OK, next year, here's the work we need to do.
• 19:11
  Speaker 2: So we're going to pick up from where we left off this year and move into this.
• 19:13
  Speaker 2: Boom, boom, boom, boom.
• 19:14
  Speaker 2: So that's what RBO was, and it was just an agreement on.
• 19:17
  Speaker 2: This is what we're going to do.
• 19:19
  Speaker 2: And then it got to the point where every I want to say every two years the city it went from every year negotiating the union for a contract every two years.
• 19:28
  Speaker 2: They said this is stupid, why are we doing this every we get along, let's just do it every two years.
• 19:32
  Speaker 2: They probably wanted to go every three or four, but they thought, nah, too much stuff happens.
• 19:37
  Speaker 2: And we got to work that into whatever the MOU is.
• 19:39
  Speaker 2: So the city negotiating team would meet with the union once every two years and they would do the MOU the benefit package that the bargaining unit would get.
• 19:49
  Speaker 2: So they did their thing and then the fire department did its thing.
• 19:53
  Speaker 2: This is what we're doing over here boom, boom, boom.
• 19:55
  Speaker 2: So the two had this system that you could process, and that's the way they advertised it.
• 20:03
  Speaker 2: You can process the disagreements and the differences between the two sides with the system without suing one another.
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: Essentially, or without it escalating to the point where it's I'm going to blackball you, yeah.
• 20:13
  Speaker 1: I hate you.
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: So these vice presidents of the sections would meet with the.
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: Would they meet with the chiefs yeah, the assistant chiefs on a regular basis?
• 20:22
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it was a public meeting, okay, and so you would have these meetings all the time and you would have them usually at admin and it was published in the Buckslip.
• 20:29
  Speaker 2: So every week we put out a weekly communication and you say, ok, this is when these committees are meeting Like the deployment committee would be, and most of the time nobody cared.
• 20:40
  Speaker 2: It's like, ok, you get 20 people to a meeting, you know, you get some shift commanders, you get the ops chiefs, some union guys, so whatever they're talking about whether it's the new apparatus, design or rapid intervention stuff, whatever the hell it was is that group would get together and do whatever they were going to do.
• 20:59
  Speaker 2: And, like I say, it was once a quarter.
• 21:01
  Speaker 2: So there was a time where we got squads after 9-11.
• 21:06
  Speaker 2: I mean, the federal government is just giving you whatever the hell you want.
• 21:09
  Speaker 2: So we're going to get three squads.
• 21:11
  Speaker 2: They're figuring out.
• 21:13
  Speaker 2: First of all, they're going to call them rescues or squads, and now you've already got people that are working on them and they're still being formulated over what's this final thing going to look like.
• 21:22
  Speaker 2: And we've ordered them the apparatus, and so the room wasn't big enough.
• 21:29
  Speaker 2: We had to move it to, like the YMCA conference center, the deployment meeting, because there was more than 200 people that were going to come to it.
• 21:39
  Speaker 2: And you're like, usually we get 20.
• 21:42
  Speaker 2: Why are there 200?
• 21:43
  Speaker 2: Well, because we're going to put three squads in and you're going to agree.
• 21:46
  Speaker 2: And this was the big thing.
• 21:47
  Speaker 2: Is it a squad or a rescue?
• 21:49
  Speaker 2: And that was the no.
• 21:51
  Speaker 2: A rescue is an ambulance.
• 21:52
  Speaker 2: Well, no, we should call them ambulances, because we do call our ambulances rescues.
• 21:57
  Speaker 2: So it only makes sense to call our rescues an ambulance.
• 22:00
  Speaker 2: Well, no, we're not going to work on an ambulance.
• 22:02
  Speaker 2: What's wrong with you, jesus?
• 22:04
  Speaker 2: You have no sense of humor.
• 22:06
  Speaker 2: They teach you how to tie a knot and your whole sense of humor goes away.
• 22:11
  Speaker 2: Yeah, a concrete whisper, a little too serious about yourself.
• 22:15
  Speaker 2: No, no, no, no, no, no, he's teasing me.
• 22:20
  Speaker 2: I can stop.
• 22:21
  Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, okay, but anyway.
• 22:27
  Speaker 2: So it would swell, depending on what the subject, and they would advertise it and say we're going to come to agreement on these things.
• 22:34
  Speaker 2: So what you did is you went into this room with all these people.
• 22:36
  Speaker 2: Really, who cares if they call it a rescue or a squad, I don't care.
• 22:41
  Speaker 2: They had like six people on them and you're like this is too many, this is.
• 22:45
  Speaker 2: This isn't going to work.
• 22:46
  Speaker 2: This is an untenable thing.
• 22:48
  Speaker 2: They're overstaffed.
• 22:50
  Speaker 2: Well, we need them, for, yeah, if you're going to mobilize and go to like a hurricane or an earthquake, you need 20 people, you don't need six, but just sitting around station 19,.
• 23:01
  Speaker 2: I don't think you're going to need all six people.
• 23:03
  Speaker 2: You could put them on different apparatus and do different things with them, and you know so anyway.
• 23:07
  Speaker 2: But so, anyway, the five committees and the assistant chief and vice president, along with the union president and fire chief.
• 23:21
  Speaker 2: I wanted to say that they called that the correlating committee because those were the big boys.
• 23:25
  Speaker 2: So if those five were meeting or 12, basically, well, yeah, you had five, six, yeah, it's 12 of them.
• 23:34
  Speaker 2: That was like the power structure that ran the Phoenix Fire Department, because you had the union side and the administrative side.
• 23:43
  Speaker 2: So you had the fire chief, union president and then assistants to them, essentially.
• 23:48
  Speaker 2: So, and that's really kept the order.
• 23:52
  Speaker 2: So, and there were times, vance, where people would come to me like my bosses, especially when people retired towards the end of my career, and so you got these new people coming in as the ops guy and they're trying to make sense of it and figure okay, I'm in charge now, I'm going to do X, y and Z, and I've always had this problem with the way we manage sick leave within the Phoenix Fire Department and we're not going to do it this way anymore.
• 24:18
  Speaker 2: So they call you up and say if somebody because you're a shift commander now and you do staffing they'd say from now on, when somebody calls in sick, you have to make contact with them every day at least once and find out their sickness and what they're doing and what their estimated come-back-to-work date is.
• 24:36
  Speaker 2: And so they tell you all this and you're like have you read the MOU?
• 24:43
  Speaker 2: The MOU says each member gets five occurrences a year for sick leave and each of those occurrences can be one or two shifts in duration and there is no need for any kind of medical note to verify that you had the flu or whatever you're calling in sick with.
• 25:06
  Speaker 2: And they said, yeah, well, I don't agree with that sick with.
• 25:07
  Speaker 2: And they said, yeah, well, I don't agree with that.
• 25:10
  Speaker 2: Well, that's OK, operations chief, that you don't agree with it.
• 25:18
  Speaker 2: You need to go talk to the fire chief, who needs to talk to the union president, because this was negotiated with the city, with the authority having jurisdiction.
• 25:21
  Speaker 2: So the fire chief's bosses are the ones that agreed with the union that this is the way we're going to manage this program and they go off and they'd figure out I'm an idiot, or that this is exactly what is true and isn't true, and maybe you know, then you wouldn't see him again, I wouldn't see him for months at a time.
• 25:39
  Speaker 2: Then I mean, it was just easier.
• 25:41
  Speaker 2: So yeah, but that's where that came from.
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: Well, that's an interesting.
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: I had no idea about the uh assistant chiefs with the the different committees.
• 25:51
  Speaker 1: I think that yeah that's brilliant.
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: Do you know?
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: Was that based on another system, or was that unique to phoenix?
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: Or how?
• 25:58
  Speaker 2: no, it's unique to phoenix.
• 25:59
  Speaker 2: In fact, like I said, this whole rbo thing, they hooked up with this, this government, uh, expert, the personnel, expert, lawyer, the whole thing, and so and they all talk the same language, like Drucker and the rest of it, this thing that these people that were really old used to talk about to me, this guy who invented the automobile mass production and the Japanese car industry.
• 26:23
  Speaker 1: He built essentially the Hawthorne studies, all that stuff, the wingspring, and they get into all the academic piece.
• 26:30
  Speaker 2: You're like hey man, I'm a B shifter, was assigned to a ladder company for way too long, so, yeah, I'm not suited to anything else.
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: I think the synopsis of the class that you did a couple of weeks ago really had to do.
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: I mean, it was it was good to know the history of where this all came from.
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: But somebody asked me it's like hey, I wasn't, you know, they didn't see your class and I said it really has to do with labor and management getting along.
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: Labor and management can get along and figure out a path.
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: And you guys found a path.
• 27:04
  Speaker 1: You're going to be able to serve the customer that much better and not not get caught up in these other things.
• 27:10
  Speaker 1: And we had a state union president.
• 27:12
  Speaker 1: I think that really followed that relationship by objective and and getting on the same page.
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: So we we didn't get off track and have these public fights and you know when you see the the antagonistic relationships that people have between labor and management.
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: It just it does nobody any good.
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: There's no winners in that.
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: In fact the losers the public.
• 27:37
  Speaker 2: Yeah, at the end of the day, exactly Well, and it's not like they got along perfectly the whole time.
• 27:44
  Speaker 2: I mean, the fire chief and union president have different jobs and sometimes their wants, needs and desires conflict with one another, and the two of them would tell you no, this is why we do this, is we work them out.
• 27:57
  Speaker 2: This should not derail us, as the more that we can do what we want to do, the more both of us are going to get.
• 28:04
  Speaker 2: See and that's what I took away from it, watching it, like in the back row there, as you can see, the more those two gave away their power, it came back tenfold to them and they weren't power junkies.
• 28:17
  Speaker 2: Anyone that knew the two of them would tell you no, they're the most chill people and what they focus on is their work period.
• 28:26
  Speaker 2: Alan Brunicini's work is providing emergency services to the community.
• 28:31
  Speaker 2: Pat Kintelmi's work was being the union president and nobody did it any better than those two while they were together.
• 28:38
  Speaker 2: Period.
• 28:38
  Speaker 2: And in fact, the back end of our presentation was is this happened?
• 28:44
  Speaker 2: Like in 1980, they took a strike vote?
• 28:47
  Speaker 2: We did not go on strike as a department.
• 28:49
  Speaker 2: Like in 1980, they took a strike vote, we did not go on strike as a department.
• 28:54
  Speaker 1: So instead what?
• 28:54
  Speaker 2: happened is they work through, they become closer together and recognize okay, we represent the fire department, and together we're man.
• 29:04
  Speaker 2: If you're in charge of a fire department, you have got some mojo behind you.
• 29:06
  Speaker 2: So, with Contelli doing the political piece and Alan Brunicini doing the fire chief piece the authority having jurisdiction all they could do is watch.
• 29:18
  Speaker 2: At that point, in fact, that's all they wanted to do.
• 29:20
  Speaker 2: And it was in Phoenix where you got this tax base, where the city's just getting bigger and bigger, so it fed whatever the two of them what their goals were for it.
• 29:31
  Speaker 2: So in about 1983, they're like okay, we kind of survived all this and we're in a better position, and now we're doing this and this is our service delivery.
• 29:43
  Speaker 2: The hole in this is the emergency transportation system.
• 29:47
  Speaker 2: Is we need to do something about getting ambulances to the scene quicker?
• 29:51
  Speaker 2: And back then it was all private enterprise and the system was built up for capitalists.
• 29:56
  Speaker 2: There's six AMBO companies and we use a round-robin approach to do emergency transportation services.
• 30:03
  Speaker 2: So that's the reason it took like an average of 30 minutes to get an AMBO to the scene is because of the way we dispatched them, as it was based on equity among six different AMBO companies.
• 30:16
  Speaker 2: I said no, it's the patients waiting two and three times longer than they should.
• 30:22
  Speaker 2: This is unacceptable.
• 30:23
  Speaker 2: They're like no, this is private enterprise, get over it.
• 30:26
  Speaker 2: You're the government.
• 30:27
  Speaker 2: You don't tell us how to work.
• 30:28
  Speaker 2: Well, the union president went to the city council and said we need this.
• 30:35
  Speaker 2: The fire chief went to the city manager and said we need to run the ambulance service and about six months later the Phoenix Fire Department ended up with the emergency ambulance service in the city of Phoenix.
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: Chief Bernasini said that was the most political thing he had ever been through.
• 30:49
  Speaker 2: Yeah, city of Phoenix, chief Bernasini said that was the most political thing he'd ever been through.
• 30:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it was highly political because he took what were private enterprise jobs away from private companies and put them with the government, which they said.
• 31:01
  Speaker 2: That's going to be, that's communism.
• 31:02
  Speaker 2: You're going to destroy it.
• 31:03
  Speaker 2: And you think well, before, if I worked for a private ambo company, I made $5 an hour.
• 31:08
  Speaker 2: Now I go to work for a fire department, I'm making $17 an hour.
• 31:13
  Speaker 2: I get vacation, sick leave and a pension, employee development, I get trained, I have a career.
• 31:26
  Speaker 2: And what we did is we took a 30-minute ambulance dispatch and turned it into a 10-minute ambulance dispatch and we lowered the price for a ride.
• 31:31
  Speaker 2: So why don't you tell me again how private's better than public?
• 31:37
  Speaker 2: Because it isn't.
• 31:38
  Speaker 2: No, it's not, and what it is is the price difference is they're just putting it in their pockets.
• 31:44
  Speaker 2: We all understand how that works.
• 31:45
  Speaker 2: So I mean, that's it improved the?
• 31:48
  Speaker 2: Now there's challenges to manage an ambulance system within a fire department, but you're going to get better service at the end of the day because the deployment system of a fire department is unparalleled anywhere else.
• 32:03
  Speaker 2: I mean, that's just what we do.
• 32:05
  Speaker 1: Absolutely the right thing to do, and the right thing to do is often the hard thing to do when you're taking over something like that because the ambulance guys are powerful.
• 32:14
  Speaker 1: It's in my home state right now we're going through this because it was established in the eighties and those guys have bucks man and they also they're able to write checks to the state legislators, whereas the municipalities can't.
• 32:29
  Speaker 1: And right now labor isn't really maybe on board with it 100% and it really doesn't have to do with the fire department taking it over.
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: Necessarily.
• 32:39
  Speaker 1: That is probably the best solution, but it's also another hard solution because it's hard to run an ambulance service.
• 32:48
  Speaker 2: It's got its own issues.
• 32:49
  Speaker 2: In fact, after having been part of it, I changed things about it.
• 32:53
  Speaker 2: I would make it an entry-level position.
• 32:56
  Speaker 2: There would be no turnouts or SCBAs on AMBOs.
• 32:59
  Speaker 2: You're going to work as an AMBO attendant on the EMS side of things or whatever that looks like and then we hire firefighters from the ambulances that we have.
• 33:11
  Speaker 2: So if you want to become a firefighter in this fire department, you probably need to work on an ambulance first if you're going to get hired.
• 33:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a lot of places that started doing that, I think it just makes more sense because that's the.
• 33:23
  Speaker 2: if you look at an apparatus that you want to work on, that is the last piece of apparatus anybody wants to work on and it just is good, bad or otherwise.
• 33:31
  Speaker 2: But we didn't sign up to work on AMBOs.
• 33:35
  Speaker 1: But I'll tell you, man, how many interviews I've sat through.
• 33:38
  Speaker 1: It's like okay, bobby, you know that your first two years here you're going to be working on our ambulance right?
• 33:44
  Speaker 1: Yes, sir, yes, sir, I just want to work for the fire department sir.
• 33:47
  Speaker 2: I'll never pass a dirty gurney, sir.
• 33:50
  Speaker 2: I will have two bottles of Amphil at all times.
• 33:53
  Speaker 2: Meanwhile, three months later, Bobby's like I can't wait to get on.
• 33:57
  Speaker 2: I want to strike the whambulance.
• 34:02
  Speaker 1: Ems means every minute sucks.
• 34:04
  Speaker 1: All problems end in EMS.
• 34:06
  Speaker 1: I think what happens, though, too, is from 1980 or 85, when that was even in the early 2000s is far too many people are relying on our ambulance services for their basic health care, which is a whole other issue that we're probably not going to solve here, but that's what it's growing into.
• 34:27
  Speaker 2: I used to tell people all the time the fire department is not going to solve homelessness, we're going to roll on it, but we ain't going to solve here.
• 34:28
  Speaker 2: But that's what it's growing into.
• 34:29
  Speaker 2: I used to tell people all the time the fire department is not going to solve homelessness, we're going to roll on it, but we ain't going to solve it.
• 34:33
  Speaker 2: So you know, and I think if you know, that getting on the truck it just puts you in a better position to deal with it.
• 34:39
  Speaker 2: It's like, okay, I'm going to go on another one of these and I'm going to have to be patient, and it's like, and it's almost like putting your turnouts on.
• 34:47
  Speaker 2: It's just a different form of it.
• 34:50
  Speaker 2: You're facing a different set of hazards.
• 34:52
  Speaker 2: It says, okay, I'm going to see bunghole George for the fifth time this shift and he keeps looking worse each subsequent time we see him.
• 35:04
  Speaker 1: You guys actually gave anyone working on the ambulance light at the end of the tunnel because when you, when your dad was working there, it was your first 250 shifts, or yeah, it was specified.
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: It's like, okay, I know I've got to go go to work 250 times, yeah, but that was generational, I mean we started and it was like we had no idea.
• 35:23
  Speaker 2: Then you thought, oh, this is something.
• 35:24
  Speaker 2: And then there was there was like a hiring freeze and like early, uh, the snls failed way back in the day the late 90s or whatever it was and so there was a period of like two years where we didn't hire a lot of people.
• 35:37
  Speaker 2: Well, the people stuck on the ambos were starting to twitch because they were going like to their fourth year and in fact there were some that you had to put in witness protection because, like the crew took, they tackled them before they could get the K-12 started to cut the rig in half, kind of stuff.
• 35:54
  Speaker 2: You know.
• 35:55
  Speaker 2: So those old, yeah, like AA stories that we tell Like no, we had to send John away for a little bit and then he got good enough that he could come back.
• 36:04
  Speaker 2: But you learn a lot once you run them for a while.
• 36:09
  Speaker 1: Let's do a timeless tactical truth the 10 of diamonds.
• 36:18
  Speaker 1: You know I'm just going to make cards up that don't exist.
• 36:20
  Speaker 1: This is the 47th spade.
• 36:24
  Speaker 2: All right.
• 36:24
  Speaker 1: No, the 10 of diamonds.
• 36:25
  Speaker 1: If the incident escalates and the command post capability does not, the IC and the entire incident operation may never catch up.
• 36:35
  Speaker 1: What does it mean?
• 36:37
  Speaker 1: The command post capability does not?
• 36:41
  Speaker 2: We would build command teams.
• 36:42
  Speaker 2: So if you're rocket enrolling and you're assigning a bunch of task level units and you don't have enough strategic support, very quickly, and then just as quickly tactical level officers to take the like attack positions over, then that's what we're talking about.
• 37:04
  Speaker 2: So you've got to.
• 37:05
  Speaker 2: You got to have the strategic and tactical wings keep up with the task level, especially when you're overlaying, if they're facing an elevated level of risk, if they're operating an IDLH.
• 37:18
  Speaker 1: You need the help in the command post.
• 37:20
  Speaker 1: Yeah, sooner than later.
• 37:22
  Speaker 2: Exactly so, like in our system.
• 37:24
  Speaker 2: We had two-person battalions, so you could do over an alarm out of a BC's rig by having your partner go to the logistics channel to start assigning level two stage companies to the incident action plan.
• 37:42
  Speaker 2: Well, that's a lot easier to do in a five-person command post and you don't lose your support officer when you do that then.
• 37:52
  Speaker 2: So as quick as we could, we'd get them in a five-person command post and then we would leave the IC and the support officer on their own channel, and then logistics would typically be the engineer who drove the command van would take the logistics position and set logistics up, and then the shift commander's partner would take over the safety function, if we were doing that, and then the shift commander become the senior advisor of the command team.
• 38:18
  Speaker 1: And areas like mine.
• 38:19
  Speaker 1: We just build our box alarms so we get plenty of chiefs.
• 38:22
  Speaker 2: Yeah exactly.
• 38:23
  Speaker 1: We bring in chiefs from all over.
• 38:24
  Speaker 1: Not unusual for us to have seven chiefs on a structure, fire now Exactly and plug them in.
• 38:30
  Speaker 2: And they all show up kind of in the same time frames, ours did.
• 38:33
  Speaker 2: You just get them there and they just arrive a little bit differently.
• 38:36
  Speaker 2: So you just pair them up and do whatever you're going to do with them.
• 38:39
  Speaker 2: So it works out pretty well.
• 38:41
  Speaker 2: And then the nice thing about it is it's the same routine.
• 38:44
  Speaker 2: So you know, it's kind of everybody knows what to expect when you get in, so like knows what to expect when you get in.
• 38:49
  Speaker 2: So like the well, you use an engineer to run the logistics section.
• 38:52
  Speaker 2: Well, yeah, they're the best at it, they know.
• 38:54
  Speaker 2: And then they know who to talk to in the dispatch center when we need heavy equipment and other things that we yeah, Uh-huh, that's why we use them Give me a backhoe.
• 39:03
  Speaker 2: Yeah, what kind do you need?
• 39:06
  Speaker 2: Oh, there's the senior, the old deputies, the staff deputy.
• 39:10
  Speaker 2: There's different kind of backhoes.
• 39:12
  Speaker 2: Yeah, there's a lot of different kinds of heavy equipment.
• 39:14
  Speaker 2: We just we have to specify.
• 39:16
  Speaker 2: It's very important.
• 39:18
  Speaker 2: Oh yeah, so we like going to the dump because we get their operators and we can't break their stuff because they have big, spiky steel wheels on them.
• 39:28
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it makes the men tingle when they see it it's like giant tonka toys.
• 39:35
  Speaker 1: That's it all right, nick.
• 39:37
  Speaker 2: Thanks man it's a pleasure conversation, as always.
• 39:40
  Speaker 1: Thanks so much for listening to b shifter.
• 39:42
  Speaker 1: See you next time.