Will fire department reform take a decade?

A year-end interview with the mayor is always a hydra-headed thing. Plenty goes on in a year, and one can never capture it all.

So it's no surprise that in my year-end interview with Mayor David Henderson, the odd scrap got left out.

Much of it will come up in the near future, not the least of it the Aquatarium, slated to open in 2014 and a possible election issue over continued municipal support.

But the other difficulty with these wide-ranging interviews is the need to gloss over items that deserve an entire story on their own.

Such is the case with the mayor's recognition that the other plank in his emergency services platform, the reform of the fire department, will take a long time to build.

We've known for a while now the city is pushing to turn the all-professional fire department into a so-called “composite model,” comprised of volunteers as well as full-timers.

A service delivery review done for the city by Toronto-based Western Management Consultants, made public in October 2012, recommends changing the fire department to a composite model, predicting a saving of about 35 per cent, or about $2 million.

Not surprisingly, the Brockville Professional Firefighters Association is resisting the plan, arguing service levels and community safety will be compromised.

It may have been my mistake to assume the city's strategy would be to push for this reform all in one go: a hard-as-nails collective bargaining run, resulting in a likely arbitration bid, with the city hoping it would convincingly argue its need to scale back costs.

The thinking I'd imagined was the equivalent of a one-two punch: an OPP service contract for policing (depending of course on favourable numbers), followed by rapid reform of the fire department.

The optimistic view sees savings in such a strategy, and relief for taxpayers.

Instead, as quoted in the year-end interview, the mayor is now taking the long view on the fire side of the emergency services cost equation.

“It will not happen in one year because of our (collective agreement) obligations. That's a long process of going to negotiations and going to arbitration processes and getting contract language changed and it will take a significant amount of time,” said Henderson.

In other words, added the mayor, at each new collective bargaining session the city will make it clear the composite model is where it is heading. It will fight, at each renewal, for changes to the language aimed at eventually getting it there.

The currently looming arbitration decision affects 31 firefighters and four dispatchers and concerns a two-year collective agreement spanning 2011 and 2012.

Assuming these collective agreements continue to span two years, and depending on how drastic the language changes are at each turn, this means it could be well into the next decade before the city gets the fire department to resemble the composite model described by the consultants.

That's an admittedly pessimistic view, I'll grant.

However, collective agreements don't happen in a vacuum. They take shape according to the economy that generates them, and, in the public sector, according to precedents set across the province.

Given the city's difficulty with provincial arbitration in recent years, pessimism may just be another word for realism.

And, from city hall's point of view at least, “election,” as in provincial, might be another word for “hope."