Detroit firefighters to endorse mayoral candidate next week, or not at all

(Photo: Josh Schipper via Flickr.com)

The union representing Detroit’s 1,100 firefighters wants mayoral candidates Dave Bing and Kenneth Cockrel Jr. to pledge to start hiring more firefighters and quit asking for arbitration.

Detroit Firefighters Association President Daniel F. McNamara said the association has interviewed Cockrel and will interview Bing Friday. Next week, the union will decide whether to endorse one of the two or not make an endorsement altogether.

McNamara said that decision hinges on whether either candidate supports the city and its fire department’s “current actions that are taken against our members and our association.” At the top of that list, McNamara said, are continual attempts to renegotiate the labor contract between the union and the city, as well as the city’s refusal to hire up to 150 firefighters.

The budget is so tight that not only is Detroit not hiring firefighters, it also “browns out” six to 10 individual departments, McNamara said, referring to temporary one-day department closures.

“We fight every day to try to get the city to hire,” he said. “The average age of our firefighters is in the 40s.”

Manpower and contracts aside, one of the greatest threats to firefighters in the city are its abandoned buildings that can collapse while firefighters are inside them. Engine 23’s Walter Harris was killed last year when an abandoned house’s roof collapsed on him while he was responding to a fire.

McNamara said Detroit has more than 80,000 vacant dwellings and that the association wants the city to create a program to identify and mark “occupied, vacant and abandoned” buildings. The labels would give fire departments more information to use when deciding to enter a building.

But just because a building is technically vacant or abandoned doesn’t mean it’s uninhabited.

“People have to understand that in today’s economy, we do have people living in vacant and abandoned homes,” McNamara said.

(Justin Miller is a political journalist based in Wayne County who has worked for Real Clear Politics, blogged for The Atlantic and covered the 2008 elections in Ohio for The New York Observer’s Politicker.com network of state politics news sites.)