Residents of northwest Gilroy received an early Halloween scare
last week as members of the Association of Fire Fighters Local 2805
left bright orange fliers placed on their cars and doorsteps.
Residents of northwest Gilroy received an early Halloween scare last week as members of the Association of Fire Fighters Local 2805 left bright orange fliers placed on their cars and doorsteps.
“Your neighborhood fire station will be CLOSED,” proclaimed the leaflets, stating that the Sunrise Fire Station was slated to shut down this past Sunday. The fliers contained a link to the union’s Web site, which gives a more complete story: The station actually will only close on days when the fire department cannot adequately staff the city’s other two fire stations. Still, the leaflets elicited fear from residents this week, and prompted the City of Gilroy to tell its own side of the story in a press release.
“It looked like it was closing permanently,” Partridge Drive resident Clara Lozon said Friday after someone had placed a flier on her car at Luigi Aprea Elementary School.
She expressed relief upon learning that the fire station would only be closed certain days, although she said it was still concerning that it would not always be open.
The station is slated to be closed eight to 10 days in November, and its closures in future months will depend upon whether other fire stations have at least four firefighters, as required by a prior agreement between the city and Local 2805.
Sunrise Fire Station, 880 Sunrise Drive, oversees emergency services north of Hecker Pass Highway and West of Santa Teresa Boulevard in Gilroy. It is also the first unit to respond in areas north of Mantelli Drive and west of Kern Avenue. The station is Gilroy’s newest, having opened in 2004.
The station receives a substantially fewer calls – 343 in 2008 – than the Las Animas and Chestnut stations – 1,647 and 1,586, respectively – according to city data. Responses could take longer than five minutes on days when the Sunrise station is closed, city officials said.
City Administrator Tom Haglund said it is hard to know how long response times will be on those days. Jim Buessing, secretary and treasurer of Local 2805, estimated that the lag time could be anywhere from two to 10 minutes. Las Animas Station, 8383 Wren Ave., would be the first responder to emergencies in the Sunrise district on those “brownout” days.
Sunrise became a two-person unit at most times and occasionally a three-person station after the city laid off four firefighters and eliminated two vacant firefighter positions late last year. After that, the city and Local 2805 reached a “concession agreement” this spring in which they agreed on further personnel costs, including furloughs. Cost-cutting measures within that agreement included occasional Sunrise station closures.
While union members said they agreed with the city on staffing requirements, they say they did not agree to the brownouts – they merely recognized that the city had the right to close the station at times in accordance with prior city agreements.
“We didn’t agree to this, we acknowledged it,” said Mark Ordaz, vice president of Local 2805.
Public safety needs to be a top priority for the city, he said. The union’s Web site estimates that it would cost $300,000 to maintain the existing service in the Sunrise district and $750,000 to increase service by putting an engine back in service.
Although the City Council had talked about the possibility of brownouts at the Sunset station earlier this year, Ordaz believed the city wanted to be somewhat discreet about the matter.
“I think the city remained a little quiet until we squeaked a bit,” Ordaz said, adding that the union had generally covered the entire northwest quadrant of the city with fliers by Oct. 26.
Mayor Al Pinheiro said that a friend had told him about the fliers on Wednesday when they were first distributed. Pinheiro notified City Administrator Tom Haglund, and the city posted a news release on its Web site the following day.
The city has been quite open during past council meetings about the possibility of implementing brownouts at the Sunset station, he said.
“The city’s job was not to build a fire station like that and then have it close,” Pinheiro said.
The city could keep the station open if the union allowed for only three firefighters to staff the Las Animas and Chestnut stations, he said. The city’s news release also stressed this point, noting that San Jose and Gilroy are the only cities in Santa Clara County that require four firefighters for each engine.
The four-person requirement is a safety issue, union members said. Many fire departments that require fewer firefighters per engine have larger departments that can send more people to an emergency if needed, Buessing said. The city should make the fire department a funding priority, dipping into its healthy reserves if necessary, he said.
“The priority is public safety,” he said. “(The city needs) to understand that. Public safety needs to be No. 1 in their lives – not parks, not trees.”
The union’s Web site has a link for residents to contact officials, and Buessing said he hopes concerned residents will voice their opposition to council members.
El Caminito resident Annette Aguirre, who received a flier Friday from Local 2805, said she probably would not contact council members but she planned to contact a friend of hers who is a firefighter.
“It’s not good at all,” she said of the brownouts. “It’s just sad.”
She recalled seeing a television news broadcast about a structure in Salinas that had caught fire shortly after a fire station had closed there. Still, Lozon said she was not too worried about safety in the area.
“I’m sure that we’d be fine if we had an emergency anyway,” she said. “I know that we’ve always had a quick response if we ever had an emergency here. I feel pretty safe here.”
Firefighters placed a closed sign in front of the fire station Sunday. Local 2805 representatives could take other actions to inform the public about fire department issues in the future, they said. Meanwhile, they are doing all they can to get the word out about the brownouts.
“It ain’t going to be hush-hush,” Ordaz said.
