You may already be aware of this graphic, which was posted April 24th on the Cedar Falls City Government's Facebook page. It states that the 'PSO Model' will save taxpayers nearly $2M a year:
What you might not know is that, in getting to these numbers, the plan assumes the elimination of ALL career firefighters. Here are the background calculations (provided by the city) which led to the above graphic. The top table is the assumed staff costs using career firefighters, and the bottom chart is what the city would pay for staff using a fully-implemented "PSO Model".
In the lower table above, you can see that there are ONLY Public Safety Officers. The actual costs here are debatable (it makes quite a few assumptions about health care coverage, pay grades, etc). But for me, the bigger concern is the complete replacement of career firefighters with Public Safety Officers. The City Council has never brought this to a vote; the city is moving in this direction through retirements and "planned attrition" (a euphemism if I've ever heard one). And as a result, this is the 'blank check' for the Public Safety Department that I warned about back in November, because the Council does not have a publicly accountable vote on this. When career firefighters in Cedar Falls quit or retire, they will continue to be replaced with PSOs until there are no career firefighters left.
The changes described above are why I pushed last November for the City Council to commission and approve a Five-Year Strategic Plan for Public Safety. By law, the Cedar Falls City Council is the final authority on all public safety matters and should be exercising healthy oversight of it. Instead, I am finding out about specific city changes through the Courier, and reading that these specific actions are "council directed". I've written in the past about my concerns for expecting a single public safety professional to be expert in two separate careers paths -- local law enforcement AND fire/rescue. But that's beside the point here.
What's at stake is your right -- and ability -- to hold your elected officials accountable. You deserve to know how your representatives side on issues of this magnitude...through open, public dialogue and voting which is recorded and broadcast, instead of simply as a consensus in informal council work sessions. In the November 2018 Goal Setting work session, council members gave a consensus (no vote and no recorded discussion) to "aggressively expand the PSO model". I think I was the lone dissenter. For an issue of this size, a consensus simply isn't enough. A publicly accountable discussion and vote is required, and I believe the best way to do that is through the approval of a Five Year Strategic Plan, where the staffing goals of our Public Safety Services Department can be formally approved. This is a crucial part of our oversight role as a City Council, and we must do it.
So, I hope you'll ask your City Council representatives and candidates, "Do you support the replacement of all career firefighters with public safety officers?" because that appears to be the direction we're headed.