Won’t take the heat

What happened in North Las Vegas this week is a microcosm of how public employee unions have owned, lock, stock and barrel, too many local politicians, resulting in a compensation and benefit schedule that simply cannot be sustained during an economic downturn, let alone over the long term.

On Wednesday, scores of firefighters packed the North Las Vegas City Council chambers to protest potential budget cuts brought on by the region's economic slump. The city has undergone five rounds of budget trims since December 2008, and now aims to cut an additional $33.4 million from planned spending to make it through fiscal year 2011. So the city announced this month it might have to cut up to 273 jobs -- 21 of them from the Fire Department.

To avoid feeling any pain, and to generate more hours of actual work and thus justify their highly paid jobs, the unionized firefighters want the council to change rules so they would be responsible for driving emergency patients to local hospitals. Right now, private ambulance companies handle such transport.

The change, claims Chief Al Gillespie, would produce revenue for the city and "hopefully prevent the loss of some of our fire service folks." The chief estimated that if the change were adopted, the department would go from transporting about 25 patients each month to 375.

What a great idea!

Yes, yes, that would mean the city "is trying to fix their budget shortfall by taking revenue and jobs from the private sector and shifting it to the public sector to minimize the impact on public employees," complains John Wilson, local general manager of the private ambulance service that currently transports most of North Las Vegas' emergency patients. His firm might have to lay off at least a dozen taxpaying, private-sector employees if the change is adopted, claimed Mr. Wilson, who also challenged the notion that the added ambulance fees should be viewed as pure gravy.

But which is more important: keeping private, taxpaying businesses in business and providing competent services to the public at the lowest possible cost, or finding something for our underemployed firefighters to do, in order to justify their salaries -- which in North Las Vegas now average $104,000 per year ($155,000 with benefits) -- as well as the lifelong tax-paid pensions they enjoy for many decades after they retire?

Why, it's a no-brainer!

Next, we hope the North Las Vegas City Council will force Jack in the Box and McDonald's to hire only unionized firefighters to staff their fast-food franchises. So what if dozens of hamburger flippers or drive-through clerks lose their jobs? What does the city need with those low-paid clowns, anyway? Are those the kinds of jobs we want? Certainly not! The taxpayers would much prefer to see $100,000 uniformed firefighters cooking our burgers and asking, "Do you want fries with that?"

For the irony deprived, the idea of finding "new things for the firefighters to do" so that taxpayers can continue to go bankrupt ensuring they keep their generous salaries and benefits is absurd.

No one is saying firefighters aren't fine, courageous people or that local municipalities shouldn't have any, at all. But municipal personnel and pension costs grew at unsustainable rates during the go-go-years, and both the number of personnel and their salaries and benefits must now be slashed to sustainable levels.

The fact that the North Las Vegas City Council opted to table this issue for a few weeks rather than simply tell the firefighters to go pound sand tells you all you need to know about how we got into this mess in the first place.