Friday Morning Lineup
Wow, this week zipped by…. here it is Friday already. But at least the winter weather is losing its grip and starting to slide away. Before you know it, the St. Patrick’s Day parades will be starting up and kicking off the Spring frolics.
Fireball pointed out to me that yesterday was the 1-year anniversary for the online magazine Urban Firefighter. The ambitious project of Ray McCormack and Erich Roden has set a new level of online publishing quality by presenting thorough and professionally designed articles that are unmatched in their value to firefighters.
They are sticking to what works, too, by not rushing the presentation and relying on quality over frequency to deliver a good product. Refining a magazine-type publication is no easy task and I admire their ability to present a top-notch e-mag right off the bat like that.
Our congratulations to all the first-alarm crew at the Urban Firefighter for making it past the toughest year, the first one.
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One of the most-widely read articles we have posted recently was the story two days ago (HERE) on the dunderheads who run the city council of Allen Park, Michigan, deciding to lay off the entire fire department because the council couldn’t operate the city within its means. Underlying their problem was the decision to sell $25 million in muni bonds in the hope of landing a motion picture production company. Their hopes were shattered when the deal never materialized and the city was left holding the bill for paying off the bond along with the interest that accrues every year.
While they tried to snooker the citizens into thinking that closing the fire department was an immediately necessary action, nobody fell for the line. And the truth has come out since then with the city manager telling the press that the council voted to issue the layoff notices on the advice of the lawyer that handles the city’s union negotiations, in an effort to win concessions from firefighters. So there you have it, admitting that the reason they suddenly thrust the families of all their firefighters into convulsions of worry, and maybe worse, and riling up the citizens into fearing that house fires will just be left to burn in order to violate a legal contract. The Allen Park city council makes the infamous “gang that can’t shoot straight” look like geniuses.
Not only are they creating turmoil in their town by pulling this stunt without telling their voters what’s going on, they then make a public statement that it’s a gimmick to break a contract. That one statement alone is enough to get a judge’s order to stay the action. A contract is a contract and you can’t arbitrarily decide to not honor it. The blabby city manager also said that the city “has talked to other municipalities theoretically about how to share some city services,” hinting that they have arranged for somebody else to run fire and medical calls in their town. But the fire chief said in an interview that he has called around to all the neighboring fire chiefs and none of them have had any contacts with anyone from Allen Park about setting up coverage. What a mess they have made.
We’d better avoid making a mess here and get this equipment checked out. I’ll get the coffee started.
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