HOT SPRINGS — City officials said Thursday that the three unpaid furlough days all employees will be required to take next year will have minimal impact on public safety departments.
In order to balance the 2010 city budget, which was approved by the Hot Springs Board of Directors on Tuesday night, all city employees will be required to take three unpaid days off during the year.
City Manager Lance Hudnell said recently that those days will be George Washington’s Birthday and Daisy Gatson Bates Day; Columbus Day; and Good Friday. Public safety personnel scheduled to work on those three days would work their schedule, but take another day off as a furlough day.
“What [Fire Chief] Ed [Davis] told the board at their work session was that he is going to have some type of rolling schedule where he will have a station closed for a period of time, but will try to minimize that to a few hours a day on certain days,” Hudnell said Thursday.
“What we’ll do is shut one company at a time down for half a shift,” Davis said, explaining that a normal shift is 24 hours and a company is composed of a truck and its crew.
“We’ll rotate the companies so that no individual area of the city would be penalized or anything like that,” Davis said.
Using a rotating schedule, Davis said it would take 24 days to furlough all the firefighters, “and we’d have to do that on three different occasions in the coming year.”
A station that has only one truck would be closed for a 12-hour period during the 24-day cycle, Davis said.
Davis said the rotating furlough schedule would not affect the city’s Insurance Services Office rating, which affects the insurance premiums that individuals pay on their homes and commercial buildings, but could lengthen call response times.
“I can’t guarantee we’ll meet our normal response times, which are under five minutes,”Davis said.
“We’re in some tough times and we’re just going to have to deal with it. We have to try to give the public the best possible protection we can and we’re going to do that,” Davis said.
Police Chief Bobby Southard said the furloughs will probably mean a longer response time to nonemergency calls, there may be some delay in following up on burglarytype calls, and reports may not be available to the public as quickly as before.
“If it’s an emergency, someone will go, but on normal, routine, everyday-type calls, it could take 10 minutes now where it used to take five minutes,” Southard said.
“It’s also important for people to understand that if you call 911, it needs to be an emergency. If 911 is being used for things other than ‘I need police right now,’ and I have a shortage of manpower in the 911 center answering calls, then we’ll get a delay.
“But we’re not going to jeopardize public safety. If the ... flu hits the department, I may have to go to 10- to 12-hour shifts in order to provide coverage, and I’m not saying we’ll save any money, but we’re going to cover it with manpower.”
Arkansas, Pages 10 on 12/21/2009