Fire-ology & labor firegeezer on 12 Sep 2008 03:02 pm
Fire Chief Fights Suspension
EAST POINT, GEORGIA, IS A CITY THAT IS continually embarrassed by its own actions. This week’s foo-faw comes as the Mayor is trying to hand out a 5-day suspension to Fire Chief Rosemary Cloud. She has hired a lawyer to fight it and he is taking the dispute public.
Chief Rosemary Cloud
George O. Lawson, her attorney, says that the five-day suspension without pay, which was issued Sept. 2, is “frivolous.” The mayor’s office says that she was suspended for being unwilling to make budget cuts and for granting media interviews. Lawson points out that Chief Cloud did make recommendations for budget cuts and that the city has not explained what media interviews she improperly gave.
She is still working while she awaits an appeal hearing on the matter. The city has not yet scheduled one.
East Point made the news recently when they shut down two of the city’s five fire stations - 40% of their coverage - and laid off 48 firefighters to make up for a $5 million budget gap. The city was already failing to meet national standards for response times and the chief said it was too early to determine what impact the layoffs would have on response times.
That last response to a question from the Atlanta newspaper may be what sparked the suspension. It appears that the city council didn’t want bad news to leak out to the taxpayers.
This past Sunday when the FD tried to fight a fire in a vacant apartment building, the firefighters tried five different hydrants before they could get enough water to charge a hose line. The first working hydrant they were able to use was a quarter-mile away.
The city has a long-standing problem with inadequate flows from its hydrants. The mayor told the Journal-Constitution “The city of East Point has an older [water and sewer] system. A lot of these lines have been in the ground 50, 60, dare I say, 100 years.”
The city-that-fails-to-function is also under a consent decree with the Georgia Environmental Protection Division to improve its sewer system, with a deadline of 2010 to complete most of the work.
Mayor Joseph Macon
The full article from the Journal-Constitution is HERE.
The story on the hydrant problem at the apartment fire is HERE.
On its website, the City claims that “East Point is the crown jewel of the suburban metropolitan Atlanta area. The City of East Point offers the amenities of a large city with the safety, convenience, friendliness and charm of a small town. One of the safest and most economical areas to reside and work, East Point has award-winning public safety divisions including outstanding Police and Fire Departments.”
