Month: April 2013

Fire Policies Aimed at Fourth Fire Station Endangered the Public – It was not a complete shock when yesterday’s column on fire staffing and calls for service was met with a post by a retired firefighter that represented a veiled threat to myself and the Vanguard.  After all, it was the summer of 2011 when the Vanguard learned that the firefighters were boycotting the Westlake Market due to their advertising on the Vanguard.

In 2008 when I spoke out against the firefighters during the city council campaign, my wife, who was running for council at the time, dared to call 3% at 50 unsustainable.  The union president, Bobby Weist, we would learn, responded by trying to get my wife and some others fired from their jobs.

Yesterday’s article laid critical groundwork arguing for the moving of the central fire station, north from its current location on Fifth Street to Covell Blvd., to take advantage of the city-UC Davis agreement to drop boundaries between the two departments.

As we showed yesterday, by enacting boundary drop, UC Davis’ fire station could serve much of the core area within a four-minute travel time.  By moving the existing Davis fire station northward, it would be able to cover northern Davis, including Wildhorse Ranch, within existing response time parameters.

Vanguard Analysis Demonstrates that Public Safety Was Sacrificed in An Effort to Show Necessity of Fourth Fire Station – On Tuesday night, the Davis City Council will hear yet another iteration of the fire staffing report.  This time, it will be in the framework of a broader budgetary discussion.

The Davis firefighters are organizing some in the community around the idea that reductions in staffing from 12 to 11 will risk public safety by increasing response times and delaying entry into buildings that are on fire.

By Rochelle Swanson and Rob White

April 25, 2012 (Davis, CA) – It has been about a week since we returned from Washington DC and the Davis/Yolo County legislative advocacy trip that was done in conjunction with the Sacramento Metro Chamber’s 2013 Capitol-to-Capitol program.  Portions of the team have met up to debrief and work on sorting through the long list of potential action items that came from the trip and team meetings are scheduled for the weeks to come.  Thank you letters have been started, follow-up calls have been made, and strategy sessions have been calendared.

It is important that we take time up front to thank the people that invested their time and effort to make this a reality.  As you may remember from earlier posts, the representatives that were part of the Davis/Yolo County team that went out in advance of the Cap-to-Cap program included officials from the City of Davis, Yolo County, Davis businesses, Davis Chamber of Commerce, and UC Davis.  Everyone on the team paid some part of the trip out of their own funds, and some paid for the entire trip on their own.  That is a testament to the engagement by the team and the importance of our efforts.  Additionally, the team members spent many late hours and very early mornings before the trip preparing briefing papers, working on handouts, and identifying some of the key policy areas that are important to the Davis and Yolo communities.

According to new data that the Vanguard has received from the city of Davis, a comparison of Davis to ten other regional communities plus UC Davis found that the city of Davis firefighters received, both in salary and total compensation, more than all but two other communities (Fairfield and Vacaville), while their police counterparts received less than both average and median income and total compensation.  Only Sacramento and West Sacramento police received less among cities.

These data continue a trend that the Vanguard has reported on since the seminal May 2009 article that asked, “Why Do Firefighters Make Substantially More Than Police Officers in Davis?“