I didn’t understand Mayor Katie Wilson’s proposed budget cuts to the fire department until I found myself giving CPR to a dying man in Magnolia, the kind of peripheral neighborhood of Seattle that is most at risk from her call to cut firefighter hours.
It was 5:32 p.m. on that September afternoon when I heard someone collapse onto the dusty trail in Discovery Park, and saw a doctor giving a man CPR while a friend called 911. The question in that moment—When the fuck are the EMTs gonna get here?—is at the heart of the fight over the city budget that will be playing out in Seattle for at least the next few weeks.
Wilson’s budget proposes cuts from all city departments, but identifies the biggest cut in the fire department, in the form of a $7 million cut to overtime. It’s part of Wilson’s effort to shrink spending and abandon budget tricks of her predecessors that achieved a legally required “balanced budget” by creating future debts.
Wilson won’t raise taxes in the short term, and hasn’t laid out a plan for more progressive revenue. So the pie is not getting bigger, at least in this round of budget wrangling.
City Council President Dan Strauss disagrees about how big the pie is, and has released a counterproposal that reverses most of Wilson’s cuts, including increasing fire fighter overtime instead of cutting it. Much of his budget proposal redeploys those old tricks from the Harrell administration (onetime funding, drawing on reserves, optimistic budget forecasts) that put the city in the red in subsequent years. Strauss argues that “trying to correct for that in a single budget cycle can be dangerous,” suggesting that if the city is going to quit over spending, it shouldn’t quit cold turkey.
The budget wrangling over the next few weeks will determine how much cash goes to firefighter overtime, funding for gender-based violence programs, and countless pet projects from city councilors that fund public art, sports programs, and small transportation projects.
City agencies have already shared some information on fire department overtime, but not done a deep analysis of how response times could change by neighborhood if those proposed overtime cuts went into effect.
“They’ve given us averages and they’ve given us examples, but it is unclear which apparatus or engines would have additional response times because it is dependent on who has vacation, who has called out sick, and in some cases, who wants to work overtime,” Strauss says.
Seattleites are already playing this EMT-version of Russian roulette when they call 911, because the fire department already furloughs fire units when there aren’t enough staff. There’s no way to know on a given day if your closest first responders are on duty, or will punt your call to a firehouse further away.
But if you want a sense of how current “unit outages” might be affecting your neighborhood, there’s a way to ballpark it. Assuming the sick days and vacation days are randomly distributed across firehouses, it’s the small ones, with only a single response vehicle, that are more likely to be furloughed. That thinness of staffing would be compounded by cuts to overtime.
“There are some fire stations that would have a higher impact than others,” Strauss says.
And yes, I made you a map, where you can look up the closest fire station to your home, school, or workplace. I’ve marked single-unit firehouses in red.
The 57-year-old man dying before me and the other Good Samaritans in the dirt below the wild apple trees at Discovery Park day was clearly down on his luck, with black teeth and ill-fitting clothing. 911 operators marked it as a suspected overdose.
But for the most crucial minutes, he was extremely lucky.
Two doctors stumbled across him within seconds. And he was also lucky that Engine 41, the single unit fire engine operating out of Magnolia, was able to head straight for him, responding within four minutes.
About five minutes later, after fire fighters were already working on him, an ambulance arrived from another fire station in Ballard. They ultimately got him to the hospital alive but with life-threatening injuries, Fire Department spokesman David Cuerpo said in an email.
Firefighter overtime isn’t the only important issue, or even the one that has lives at stake.
The Council has held multiple public comment sessions, including one on Thursday. It’s also hearing from city departments over the next two weeks regarding public safety, libraries and education, housing arts and civil rights, tribal issues, land use, parks, transportation, and homelessness.
Whatever budget issue you’re passionate about, you can watch those presentations next week or visit the city council, though comment is only open by email per the current calendar.
