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 station will close on days when the fire department cannot staff the city’s other two fire stations.
Still, the leaflets elicited fear from residents this week, and several people stopped by a lot across the street from the Sunrise Station on Sunday to talk to union representatives who were on hand during the station’s first “brownout” day of closure.
“I’ll be out here every day that this station is closed,” Mark Ordaz, vice president of Local 2805, said Sunday as he and two other firefighters sat next to a truck on Sunrise Drive which held a sign touting the station’s closure and plugging the union’s Web site.
The station will likely be closed at least 20 days this month, according to union officials. Closures in future months will depend upon whether other stations have at least four firefighters, as required in the union 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. 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. It receives 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. Jim Buessing, secretary and treasurer of Local 2805, estimated that the lag time could be anywhere from two to 10 minutes.
Las Animas Fire Station, 8383 Wren Ave., is the first responder to emergencies in the Sunrise district during brownout days, unless firefighters at that station are responding to another emergency. In that case, Chestnut Station, 7070 Chestnut St., would respond.
Sunrise became a primarily two-person unit after the city laid off four firefighters and eliminated two vacant firefighter positions late last year. The city and Local 2805 reached a “concession agreement” this spring in which they agreed on further cuts, 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.
Public safety needs to be a top priority for the city, Ordaz 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 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 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. San Jose and Gilroy are the only cities in Santa Clara County that require four firefighters for each engine, the press release said.
The four-person requirement is a safety issue, union members said. Most 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, which was created within the past three weeks in response to the brownout situation, has a link for residents to contact officials. Union representatives said they hope concerned residents will voice their opposition to council members.
Meanwhile, Partridge Drive resident Clara Lozon 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.
“It looked like it was closing permanently,” she said Friday after someone had placed a flier on her car at Luigi Aprea Elementary School.
Apparently, several people were under that impression within the last week.
Councilman Bob Dillon said he responded to a few e-mails and a phone call from constituents.
“It sounds to me like some inaccuracies are being floated,” he said.
In the meantime, Local 2805 representatives say they will continue to take action to inform the public.
“It ain’t going to be hush-hush,” Ordaz said.
