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Slicing the Fire Department


fire department
Photo (cc) xiaming

In 2009, it was 16.

In both 2010 and 2011, the magic number grew to 20.

For the past three years, the Bloomberg administration has threatened to throw dozens of fire companies into the furnace. Faced with billion-dollar deficits, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has repeatedly attempted to hack away at the Fire Department's ranks for the sake of fiscal prudence and cost cutting.

Now that Bloomberg wants to reduce the number of companies for the seventh time in his tenure, insiders wonder whether his intention is to save cash or shrink the size of the department altogether.

"When [Bloomberg] first came in he said famously, 'Everyone had to do more with less well,'" said Martin Steadman, the research director for the Uniformed Fire Officers Association. "The Fire Department has had to do far more with far less."

Only six companies have actually closed since Bloomberg took the reins at City Hall in 2002. In his preliminary budget proposal released in February, Bloomberg threatened to add 20 more to that list. The mayor also recently reduced the number of firefighters from five to four on 60 of the city's nearly 200 engine companies -- otherwise known as the team of firefighters on one truck.

Union leaders are preparing to fight the closures and the staff reductions with all hands. But experts in the field think Bloomberg should take advantage of the city's fiscal woes. Bloomberg, they say, should examine the entire Fire Department, weed out waste and reorganize companies so firehouses are in neighborhoods where they are needed the most.

"Every time you have a problem, you talk about cutting a firehouse, it's not really good management," said Thomas Von Essen, the fire commissioner in the Giuliani administration. "I don’t think the Bloomberg administration has a clue of the inside workings of the Fire Department."

Slashing Services

Representatives from fire officers and firefighters' unions will tell you they had their busiest year ever in 2010. The department responded to more than 507,430 incidents -- a record-breaker and a 7.3 percent increase over 2009.

When asked about staff reductions, union officials point to a five-alarm fire in Flatbush last month, which killed one person and injured dozens of firefighters. Just two weeks earlier, a staffing reduction on engines took effect (the mayor denies the fire had anything to do with the staff cuts).

"It's truly a game of Russian roulette," said Tom Butler, a spokesperson for the Uniformed Firefighters Association. "The purpose of government is to protect the citizenry. If it cant keep people safe, than what's the purpose of it?"

Unlike the Police Department, which has been held relatively harmless during the administration's nine rounds of budget cuts, the Fire Department has been repeatedly targeted.

Last year, Bloomberg threatened to shutter 20 companies at night. At the time, when asked if he thought the Fire Department was too large, the mayor said: "The way the Fire Department works is fundamentally if you want to cut back, you have to close companies. It's one of these things, you can never have too much, but I can tell you we can't afford much."

In an emailed statement, Marc LaVorgna, a Bloomberg spokesperson, denies the mayor's intention is to shrink the Fire Department.

"The reason for the proposed cuts at FDNY is because every agency in the city -- police, education, transportation and on down the list -- has to make reductions because we simply don’t have the resources, primarily because of the growth in costs like pensions, which are eating into the dollars we want to use to provide services to New Yorkers," LaVorgna said. "The Fire Department is no different and that is why reductions have been proposed."

Not since the 1970s has the department been under such heavy fire. Then the city shuttered 16 fire companies and lost approximately 2,000 firefighters.

So far the cuts in mass have never materialized. For the past three years in a row, the City Council has used its discretionary funding to stave off company closures.

That doesn't mean the same thing will happen this year. The city is facing closures at 105 senior centers and layoffs of thousands of teachers.

The fire commissioner, Salvatore Cassano, a lifelong firefighter who has held every position in the ranks, has expressed concern over the company closures.

"It would impact our operations severely," said Cassano last month of the proposed company closures. "Our response times would increase. I would be concerned if we had to do it."

The Fire Department is scheduled to testify at the City Council today on the mayor's latest budget proposal.

Incidents on the Rise

Even though the department had a record year in 2010, the type of calls it responds to has changed drastically over the years.

In the 1970s, the men in yellow and black were kept busy hosing down blazes in the Bronx (the department responded to 56,810 structural fires in 1976). Last year, the department responded to less than half that number. In 1976, FDNY rushed to more than 96,000 non-structural fires. Last year, it went to just over 18,000.

On the other hand, the number of medical emergencies the department responds to has skyrocketed. Since 1993, the department has sent an engine to serious medical emergencies, including a heart attack or choking, because engines have quicker response times than emergency service vehicles. Last year, they went to more than 218,600 emergencies.

So while structural fires have decreased over the years, other emergency responses have gone up.

At the same time, the department has been able to shorten its response time. To all emergencies, except false alarms, the city's response time has fallen since Bloomberg took office. For structural fires, it is at a record low of 4 minutes and 1 second.

Given the changes in response, fire safety experts are encouraging the department to examine where its resources are needed most. Instead of shuttering fire companies, Glenn Corbett, an associate professor of fire science at John Jay School of Criminal Justice, has urged the city to look at response times neighborhood by neighborhood. Some neighborhoods, Corbett said, may not need a firehouse because the response time is low, while others might be in need of resources.

"Just starting off and saying we got to close 20, I don’t think anyone is ever going to argue it's going to have a positive impact," said Corbett. "You can't use the argument fire incidents are down and our response time is X. What kind of fires are we having? Perhaps the administration would like it to be simple, but it's not."

A department spokesperson said the FDNY monitors its resources constantly.

Calculating Cuts

Since Bloomberg's first budget proposal in 2002, the Fire Department's budget has increased by more than 50 percent. During that same time period, the Police Department's budget -- which has always been almost three times the size of the FDNY's -- grew by 37 percent.

The Department of Sanitation's budget has increased by 32 percent between 2002 and the projected cost in fiscal year 2012. Meanwhile, the Department for the Aging's budget has been cut by 6 percent between fiscal year 2002 and next year's budget proposal.

Bloomberg administration officials attribute increased cost in uniformed services to the rising cost of health care and pension benefits. Those services are taking a larger portion of the budget and forcing the city to reduce services.

At the same time, a discrimination lawsuit has prevented the city from hiring new firefighters. According to the department, they have lost about 500 positions.

Beyond company closures, cuts to engine company staffing have caused ire among city fire unions.

Both the Uniformed Firefighters Association and the Uniformed Fire Officers Association are appealing the mayor's staff reductions to the city Board of Collective Bargaining -- an independent agency that oversees labor negotiations. The unions hope the board will grant them a hearing and eventually determine the staff reductions pose a safety hazard.

But budget slashing doesn't end there.

To stave off larger company closures, the city has proposed to charge motorists if they are involved in a vehicle accident and the Fire Department responds. The administration also wants to remove emergency call boxes from street corners. Advocates successfully challenged the call box move in court.

Officials at the City Council have spoken out against the politically unpopular measures.

"There is no area in the city of New York that wants to see their fire protection decrease -- not at a time when our Fire Department is responding to more emergencies than every before," said Councilmember Elizabeth Crowley, the chair of the council's Fire and Criminal Justice Committee, outside of City Hall Thursday.

Experts say the city has other options. In New Jersey, said Corbett, every business that hosts a certain population, like a hospital or day care, has to pay a hazard fee. Corbett said the program raised $20 million in New Jersey.

At the City Council, which has to approve a final budget, Crowley said they are not willing to sustain any cuts to the FDNY. She said the council will push the administration to weed out unnecessary overtime costs -- costs she said are double the $55 million the city would save closing companies.

When asked if the council could hold the Fire Department harmless, Crowley was confident it could.

"Absolutely," she said. "It’s a high priority."

Court Considers Who's Responsible for False Confession


false confession
Photo (cc) mwalshhme

What happens when a man says he's guilty of murder, but state-of-the-art-science says he's not?

That is the question the New York Court of Appeals, the state's highest court, will soon answer in the case of Douglas Warney v. State of New York, which began in 1996 as People of the State of New York v. Douglas Warney.

Warney, while in police custody in Rochester, signed a detailed two-page confession and was convicted, after trial, of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison and served nine years before he was exonerated by DNA testing -- testing that prosecutors had vigorously opposed. Douglas Warney was innocent.

Once released from prison, Warney sued for compensation under New York's wrongful conviction statute. But at the earliest possible stage of litigation, the Court of Claims, where lawsuits against the state are filed, dismissed his case. The judge cited the statutory exemption of state liability and said the claimant, Warney, "through his own conduct, brought about his own conviction."

Police Pressure?

Warney's case is not an isolated instance. Studies have found that many individuals falsely confess to a crime, often because of police trickery or their own vulnerability. A number of these people have later been exonerated by DNA tests. Peter Neufeld, co-founder and co-director of the Innocence Project of Benjamin Cardozo School of Law who now represents Warney, says Warney is of below average intellect (IQ 68) and at the time of his interrogation and "confession," also was suffering from dementia.

douglas warney
Photo: the Innocence Project
Douglas Warney

A study by the New York State Bar Association found that wrongful convictions are often the result of false confessions. The Innocence Project put the number at approximately 25 percent.

That police misconduct may have elicited Warney's confession has not helped him despite the universal acknowledgment of his innocence. (The DNA at the scene matched that of another man who is already serving a life sentence for another murder, has now confessed to the murder.) According to the decision of Judge Renee Forgensi Minarik of the Court of Claims, the fact that Warney confessed overrides why he confessed.

It is standard police procedure to withhold certain details about a crime. If someone then reveals he or she has knowledge of those details, the police reason that person must be the perpetrator, and the confession is deemed reliable. In Warney's case, said Neufeld, who was not involved in Warney's original trial, "The police and prosecutor kept emphasizing that because there were 11 details that only the police -- and Warney -- knew," Warney had to be the killer. The problem, Neufeld said is "the police broke a cardinal rule," by telling Warney the details that he then provided them.

At the February argument before the Court of Appeals in Albany, Judge Robert Smith, characterized this type of police conduct as "manipulation" more than coercion, describing the actions of a suspect such as Warney, as "tell me what you want me to say and I'll say it."

For and Against Compensation

Arguing for the state, attorney Alison Natnah told New York's highest court that Warney had "no entitlement to compensation" for his years spent in prison since he should have been able to foresee that his own admission and self-incrimination, which she called "voluntary," would lead to his conviction. In other words, it was Warney and not the government who was responsible for his conviction and the years of incarceration. That it is wrongful and unjust -- not just a mistake -- is insufficient to allow the claim to proceed argued Natnah, who has recently been recommended by Sen. Charles Schumer for a federal judgeship.

Given that he has been ruled out as the perpetrator, "How could Warney have known that the weapon was a 13-inch serrated knife, and that a victim was stabbed 15 times?" Smith wanted to know. He prodded the prosecutor to tell the court how Warney could have had these facts -- unless the police told him. Natnah was unable to provide an explanation that seemed to satisfy Smith. Meantime, Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman asked how Warney's "confession" could be considered credible if "90 percent of what he knew was planted in his mind by the police," especially when one week earlier the police had taken Warney to a psychiatric hospital.

Neufeld asked the bench to reinstate Warney's claims and define "misconduct," in accord with the legislature’s intention that an unjust conviction should lead to compensation. Warney's repeating what police fed to him cannot be the misconduct the legislature referred to in carving out an exception to the wrongful conviction statute, Neufeld argued.

In what he described as "a really important case," Neufeld also asked the court to clarify that the confession itself would have to have been the "proximate" cause of the conviction, or the very thing that caused the wrongful conviction. Pressed as to whether there could ever be a false confession that would constitute misconduct, Neufeld hypothesized "perhaps a man who intentionally, falsely confessed in order to take the blame for his wife's crime."

While it may seem illogical if not incredible that an innocent person would admit committing a serious violent crime, false confessions -- admissions of guilt made despite innocence -- occur when suspects are fed the answers. They may believe, or police may suggest, that they don't need a lawyer if they are innocent and have nothing to conceal, and that asking for a lawyer will make them look guilty. The issue of wrongful convictions, including those based on false confessions has led Lippman to form a task force to analyze and identify ways to reduce the incidence of innocent people spending years behind bars.

Warney was originally convicted of murder in the first degree at a time when he could have been subject to capital punishment. He would have been unjustly convicted and also could have been executed. The DNA testing led to the true perpetrator who has since stated that he acted alone and did not know Douglas Warney.

Emily Jane Goodman is a New York State Supreme Court Justice

Bloomberg Releases Preliminary Budget, Blames Albany


Photo (cc) Edward Reed

This time he means business.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg unveiled a $65.6 billion budget Thursday, the 10th of his tenure, which reduces spending by 0.4 percent and threatens for the third year in a row to lay off thousands of teachers. Bloomberg said the city was slammed by cuts from Albany and the federal government, leaving the administration with little choice but to cut back in classrooms. As a result, the administration proposed to reduce the teacher headcount by 6,166 -- 4,666 through layoffs.

"I don't see either Washington or Albany approaching fiscal realities the way we do in our city," said Bloomberg just before delivering his semi-annual budget presentation via PowerPoint. "Government's job is not to employ as many people as possible or spend as much of the taxpayers' money as possible."

With state and federal cuts, the city faces a $4.6 billion deficit. The mayor did say he sympathized with the state's dire fiscal straits, but asked for fairness from Albany.

The mayor's budget proposal does not offer many more spending slashes than the fiscal plan the mayor unveiled in November. Some of the more severe proposed cuts, including the closure of at least 100 senior centers, come from proposals in Gov. Andrew Cuomo's budget and from funding reductions in Washington, Bloomberg said. A federal cut could slash the number of day care slots for lower income families by more than 16,600, officials said, 16 percent of the total available.

According to the Office of Management and Budget, the mayor's preliminary proposal would reduce the city workforce by 8,300 positions -- more than 5,000 of them through layoffs.

The mayor has proposed massive layoffs before, but few have actually materialized -- none have occurred in the classroom. Advocates questioned what made this year any different.

“Given the city’s growing revenues, along with the governor's clear statement that the state budget should not require local layoffs, the mayor’s insistence on teacher layoffs becomes more and more bizarre," said Michael Mulgrew, the head of the teachers union, in an e-mailed statement.

As the mayor painted a gloomy fiscal portrait from City Hall's blue room, some on the sidelines, like Mulgrew, looked on with skepticism. After the mayor announced layoffs, he also said the city had received $2 billion in unexpected revenue, which would soften the blow from state and federal cuts.

"We are in a much stronger position than most," Bloomberg explained.

But officials in the Bloomberg administration and at the City Council, who will negotiate the fiscal year 2012 budget with the mayor over the next four months, said, whatever has happened in previous years, this time it is serious.

Tackling Teacher Cuts

This fiscal year the city will receive nearly $8.2 billion in federal aid. For fiscal year 2012, which starts in July, the city will see a 27.6 percent cut, down to $5.9 billion.

On top of that, the governor's budget proposal would affect $2.1 billion worth of city services.

The mayor's preliminary proposal assumes the city will be able to successfully negotiate in Albany for an additional $600 million. Some of that will come from an infusion of education and local aid funding, while part will come from rescinding part of uniformed workers' so-called "holiday bonuses." Reducing the $12,000 a year salary supplement would require the state legislature's approval.

Should the city fail to get this funding, Bloomberg said, the administration would have to go through another round of cuts. Since the recession, the administration has gone through nine rounds of slashes and cut a total of $5.2 billion in city services.

The administration, along with Council Speaker Christine Quinn, refuses to raise taxes.

All of this combined makes these cuts, particularly to teachers, more real this year, officials said.

"I think it's real based on the numbers," said Councilmember Robert Jackson, the chair of the council's Education Committee. "I don't blame him," he said of the mayor.

Others agree.

"He's right," said Citizens Budget Commission President Carol Kellermann. "The numbers are what they are. We've been using federal aid for education. We probably should have made some of these cuts sooner. Now we're kind of at a cliff."

Should the cuts to education occur, it's unclear how devastating they would be. The Bloomberg administration has been pushing Albany to repeal a state rule that requires the city to lay off teachers based on seniority. Getting rid of the restriction has been a key element of Bloomberg's agenda this year, and education officials say it is even more necessary since the city faces state education aid slashes.

"How it impacts the size of the classroom I don’t know for a fact," said Schools Chancellor Cathie Black at City Hall Thursday on the budget cut. "But it certainly has the possibility of raising class size."

Black said there are groups of teachers the administration would try to cut first, including teachers in a reserve pool who are awaiting a classroom assignment. Black said the education department would also look into laying off teachers who are deemed "unsatisfactory."

"I still think we will be dealing with teacher layoffs," Black said.

Cuts Beyond the Classroom

Outside of the schoolhouse wall, officials and advocates fear cuts that have reemerged from the mayor's fiscal plan in November.

Once again, the mayor has proposed to cut 20 fire companies. For the past two years, the City Council has come to the rescue of the Fire Department, restoring funds for companies the mayor plans to slash. This year, with so many teachers on the line, they may not be able to do that.

"It would impact our operations severely," said Fire Commissioner Salvatore Cassano of the proposed company closures. "Our response times would increase. I would be concerned if we had to do it."

In a prepared statement, Council Speaker Christine Quinn said she had "serious concerns" about teacher layoffs, the reduction of childcare slots and the fire company closures. The speaker also identified a $27 million state cut to senior centers as a council concern.

Department for the Aging Commissioner Lilliam Barrios-Paoli said that cut would close nearly half of the city's 256 senior centers.

"It's brutal," said the Barrios-Paoli. "To think [seniors] are going to walk 20 more blocks to go to another senior center, it's not going to happen. They are going to go hungry."

With state cuts, the city will also see a reduction in funding to its adult homeless shelters. The state also plans to eliminate rental support funding for former shelter residents.

Additional Revenue

The governor, mayor and the speaker of the City Council have said they would not raise taxes.

On Thursday some council members and advocates said the city should lobby Albany to extend the millionaire's tax, a personal income tax surcharge on the state's wealthiest, which is set to expire in December. Officials said that could bring in an additional $4 billion in Albany.

"At a minimum, we must continue the existing New York State [personal income tax] surcharge on high-income households," read a statement from the council's Progressive Caucus. "The surcharge is already in place, generating over $4 billion annually, with no evidence that it has driven wealthy New Yorkers to leave the state. In a time of crisis, it would be unconscionable to cut lifelines for our schools, our seniors, and our most vulnerable while waving bon voyage to billions of dollars in revenue that we are already collecting."

Earlier this year, Cuomo said he would let the tax surcharge die. Bloomberg has been extremely vocal against the millionaire's tax, contending it would result in affluent taxpayers fleeing the city.



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