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Backed into a corner by a mounting deficit and an obstinate firefighters’ union, the City Council Tuesday will contemplate approving the first cut to fire response services in over 20 years. 

On the table is a proposal to ground one of the city’s two fire truck companies from 6 p.m. to 8 a.m. every day starting Nov. 8 to save $300,000 in overtime expenditures needed to staff it.  

City Manager Phil Kamlarz is also recommending that the council vote Tuesday to reinstate the truck company—which is scheduled for complete elimination next summer to help balance the budget in fiscal year 2006—should voters pass the paramedic tax on the November ballot. 

Opponents of the tax measure were quick to charge that the proposal is pure political gamesmanship. 

“The paramedic tax has to pay for paramedics,” said former Mayor Shirley Dean, who added she believed the city manager’s proposal was intended to get the firefighters’ union behind the tax measure. 

Councilmembers hope to keep both truck companies at full strength this winter by making a deal with the firefighters’ union for a $300,000 salary giveback. Other city unions have either been cajoled or forced into a one-time giveback of a portion of their scheduled raises, but the firefighters’ contract lacks a clause allowing the city to compel it to take a cut.  

The loss of the truck company would come on top of about $250,000 in cuts to the fire department this year, mostly in the elimination and reconfiguration of administrative posts, to help the city close a $10 million budget shortfall. 

In prior lean years, the department has also balanced budgets by shedding top positions. The most recent cut to actual fire response teams came in 1981 when the city reduced engine and truck companies from four firefighters to three. 

Truck companies, armed with aerial ladders and equipment including “the jaws of life,” undertake rescue operations and cut ventilation holes in roofs of building fires.  

With the deadline coming at the end of the month and no formal negotiations underway, some councilmembers ex-pressed frustration at the predicament they face Tuesday. 

“The firefighters have to come around on this,” said Councilmember Betty Olds, who opposes any cut to fire services. 

The union and the city have not seen eye-to-eye since the firefighters signed a contract in 2000 surrendering two years of raises in return for more generous retirement benefits. Union representative Gil Dong said the firefighters were told other unions would have to follow the same formula, but then watched as the city gave police officers a better deal. Although the city extended the firefighters’ contract in 2002 to give them parity with the police, Dong said that animosity lingers. 

“There’s a sensitivity here because the last time we took the city at its word we got burned.” 

Dong, though, seemed to back off the union’s previous stance that it wouldn’t negotiate with the city until every other bargaining unit negotiated a giveback. With the Public Employees Union Local 1 preparing to take an agreement to its members next week, only the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 1245—the city’s smallest union—is fighting the giveback. 

“We’re trying to make it work,” said Dong, who confirmed both sides have had “informal discussions” on a salary giveback. 

Instead of shutting down the truck company or giving up pay, Dong said the union has proposed subtracting $300,000 from a department fund earmarked for a new truck. Since the city’s fiscal year 2006 budget calls for eliminating the truck company entirely to save $1.3 million, Dong didn’t see the point in keeping the money tied up in the fund. 

But now that City Manager Kamlarz is asking that revenues from the Paramedic Tax go keep the truck company in operation next year at a cost of $1.3 million, tax opponents are again charging that the council isn’t being upfront about the tax. 

Although the $1.2 million Paramedics Tax is billed as preserving and bolstering emergency medical services, it would free up money in the general fund to be spent any way the council chooses. Currently the city is subsidizing its paramedic fund with $1 million from the general fund, which would be replaced by the tax. 

Dean, the former mayor, questioned why councilmembers waited until one month before Election Day to announce their plans for the tax revenue when they could have done so during budget negotiations last June. 

Noting that the city council had already given Kamlarz the authority to exact $300,000 in cuts to fire services, Dean charged that the vote on Tuesday amounted to nothing more than political theater aimed in part at presenting a dire budgetary scenario to voters. 

“I think it’s an out-and-out ploy to frighten people so they can pass the taxes,” she said. 

But Councilmember Gordon Wozniak, who supports the tax, said the proposal “made sense” and that when the council placed the tax on the ballot, the implicit assumption was that the money would go to save public safety programs. 

Should the council approve the city manager’s intention to use the tax to restore the truck company, Dong said the firefighters would likely endorse it. 

The current plan would reduce the hours of the truck company at Station Two on Berkeley Way and Henry Street, leaving Station 4 on Shattuck Avenue and Derby Street as the city’s only night truck company. 

The loss of a second truck will change the department’s response to fires, Acting Chief David Orth said. Currently for a two-alarm fire the department dispatches five engine companies and two trucks. If the truck company is cut, he said, the department would send out six engine companies and one truck, which might limit the department’s ability to get on top of a fire and control it quickly. 

According to a report Orth delivered to the council, over the last three years, the department has only needed a second ladder truck between 10 and 12 times a year. When the need for a second truck arises, Berkeley would rely on a neighboring department, Orth said. Response time for mutual aid from North Oakland averages 10 minutes for South Berkeley and 20 minutes for North Berkeley, he said. 

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