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President's Message 

Greetings,

I am honored to be representing the Redding Firefighters Association, Local 1934.  Through the last four years that I have spent as Vice President and President, I have experienced a great deal of support from the members of this Union.  I also enjoyed the luxury of working with a very experienced, talented and capable union board and negotiating team.   I owe them a great deal of thanks for their time and monetary sacrifices made to conduct business as usual.  Together and with the support of the majority of members, we have been able to conduct ourselves professionally and productively in resolving various issues.  Through it all, I have watched this union of local professional firefighters take on many issues that were not easy to resolve.  These issues took a great deal of time, patience and money on the part of our members to resolve.  At a time when union bashing has become common and popular throughout the media, fire management, and city council, we should still hold our heads up high for many of the issues and principles we have stood for.  Many of the issues we faced would not have been resolved in the best interests of the citizens or our members without our efforts financially and through intensive talks and negotiations.

Right before I was hired as a firefighter, our Union gave up a percentage in wage increases in order to establish firefighter positions for the first time.  Through further union time and money we were able to work to convince the City to establish additional firefighter positions at fire stations 1, 5, and 4. 

For the last 5-6 years, we have been faced with pressure from our city to support a public safety/road improvement sales tax.  Despite intimidation, and threats of withholding funding from our Department, our union twice voted not to support such a sales tax.  We had two reasons for that opposition.  Number one, we felt that the citizen’s support of public safety needs was being taken advantage of.  We further felt that the City had developed poor financial priorities and allowed the development community to control city direction, leaving public safety staffing inadequate.   The majority of our members felt that special projects or developments should be financed through an increase in sales tax, not public safety.   This process would allow for the public to decide whether they wanted to pay for such projects or developments.  Standing against this idea has not helped our relationship with Fire Administration, City Hall, and City Council.  We did however, do what we felt was right for the citizens and ourselves.

Our Union has also had to oppose the present Fire Chief’s changes to the Automatic Aid Agreement with the County.  We felt the changes he made to the agreement only further increased the risk to the citizens we provide protection to and to our own members’ safety. 

We also opposed the Fire Chief’s plan to reduce our present number of nine engine companies to eight.  Had we not opposed this plan, our response times to citizens’ emergencies would have dramatically increased.  Long response times were highlighted in the 2006 Grand Jury Report as being the biggest deficiency facing the Redding Fire Department.   The Chief’s plan may have made our members’ jobs safer, and less stressful by having more three-person engine companies, but it would have done so at the expense of reducing our number of engine companies available to the public’s emergencies.  We should take pride that we did the right thing for our community, even at the expense of our own safety and workload.

We also fought to maintain our fire protection services to the Redding citizens living in the Airport Road Area.  Through our efforts, we were able to keep engine company 7 stationed at the Redding Municipal Airport.  This allowed the city residents living out in that area to continue to be served by the City of Redding Fire Department. We also worked with Fire Management in keeping out private fire protection services on the airport.  As we all know, privatizing public safety is never a good thing for the community. 

As a Union, we were also able to convince the city to fund training for our members who wanted to participate in the boat program.   Our present program is continuing to improve and more members are expected to be trained in the future.  We are now providing more service to our community with no additional increase in our own wages

The flood that occurred this past year was a testimony to our members’ dedication to the community.  We had several members respond off duty to assist the on duty crews with evacuating citizens from the flooded areas.  Some of our members brought their own boats to assist with evacuations.  Faced with inclement weather, lack of protective equipment, our members did what they could do to help out.  Without the proper protective equipment, our members were forced to violate standard safety protocols in order to help citizens evacuate the area.  Fortunately no one was injured or killed.  We still have not seen the commitment from the City to provide us the protective equipment and training to handle these types of emergencies.

I am also very proud of our members’ participation in the city council race this year.  We have worked harder than ever to get the word out to the public about the candidates.  It is now up to the citizens and our members to vote for candidates who will take care of the community and not cater to developers.

So despite what some may say, I am proud of our members and the hard work and personal sacrifices many have made for the community.  Our Association spent a great deal of time and money fighting against actions that would have degraded the quality of service we provide to the community.  These actions are a sign of the development community having a stranglehold on our City Council.  Their priorities have never been to provide the best public safety.  Hopefully this City Council Election will change that direction for the benefit of the community.  Everyone in this organization should hold their heads up high, because they provide a high quality of service with very inadequate staffing, and below average pay.   It has been a lot of work, but I am proud to have served as your President.  I thank you for your trust and support.