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Rural Metro puts money, publicity ahead of firefighters

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Chris Kotterman

No one thinks twice about whom to call in an emergency. It's drilled into our heads as soon as we are old enough to speak. It's plastered all over every emergency vehicle you'll ever see.

Dial three little numbers and at least one element of the fire department will come right over. They fix you up, douse the flames, then jump back on the truck and move on. Your tax dollars at work - unless, of course, you live in Scottsdale.

Scottsdale employs the services of the Rural/Metro Fire Department, a privately owned, for-profit company, in order to keep its citizens safe. The firm contracts with the city for a base rate - $19.1 million next year - in order to provide fire service. As fire departments go, I suppose that's pretty economical. But then you come to find out why. While the primary portion of Rural/Metro service is funded by the contract, a portion of the service is funded by subscription and user fees. This occurs primarily with ambulance service, which is funded entirely through user fees. In other words, if you call an ambulance, you're paying.

Therefore, the city never pays for services that it doesn't use. To be fair, all major cities in the Valley except for Phoenix contract ambulance service. But other fire operations are funded full-time by tax dollars with no additional fees.

Rural/Metro, by its own admission, staffs fewer full-time firefighters per-capita than most municipal fire departments. It makes up the deficiency by training teams of city employees and other part-timers as backup firefighters who are available to respond in case those on duty need assistance.

Furthermore, as private employees, Rural/Metro firefighters are not eligible for the state public safety retirement system or federal benefits for their families if they are killed in the line of duty.

All of that could change if the supporters of proposition 200 get their way. The passage of proposition 200 by the voters of Scottsdale would pave the way for the city to create its own municipal fire department, making firefighters public employees and therefore eligible for the above-mentioned benefits.

Rural/Metro, naturally, maintains that they can do it better for less, and in this time of budgetary crisis, the almighty dollar is king.

"Overall the analysis shows that estimated costs generally rise as the city moves away from the staffing, salary and operations model currently used by Rural/Metro toward a fire department modeled after other cities in the Valley," wrote Scottsdale finance director Craig Clifford.

Well of course staffing a fire department at full capacity all the time costs more. Is Rural/Metro's model more cost-effective and efficient? Yes. You're not paying firefighters to sit around at the station.

But sometimes the public good becomes a greater need than cost-effectiveness. This can be a bitter pill to swallow in times of fiscal trouble, but it is a basic truth. Government is not a business; it is not designed to make money. In terms of cash flow, all fire departments are a catastrophic failure. They take money and spend it by the millions, and never give back. But I challenge you to assert that they shouldn't be around. Furthermore, I challenge you to tell me that Scottsdale's firefighters should not receive the benefits that every other firefighter in the Valley enjoys, just so the city can save some money.

The facts and figures about how much starting and maintaining a municipal fire department would cost are flying around like mad. The infrastructure, equipment and personnel are already in place. They have been for 50 years. But it's all owned by Rural/Metro and simply contracted to the city, and I doubt that the company would be inclined to give it up very easily. There is more at stake here than money for Rural/Metro.

Rural/Metro has its headquarters in Scottsdale, and the public/private partnership with the city is its crowing achievement. Scottsdale is the largest community that Rural/Metro serves, and it uses the city as the shining example of how its package of private fire protection and emergency medical services can work together. Scottsdale is more than a contract; it's a living commercial for the Rural/Metro Corporation. If it were to lose the city as a customer it would be a huge blow to the company's claims of total community satisfaction.

The voters of Scottsdale will have to make a choice. On the surface, the choice will be about what the city can afford. But underneath, the vote will be between giving firefighters what they deserve or allowing a company to maintain its image.

Chris Kotterman is a journalism and political science senior. Reach him at chris.kotterman@asu.edu.


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