The following letter was published in this week’s issue of the Gazette.
To the editor:
I hereby issue The Croton Challenge: Go one full week without calling someone racist. The prize is $14,852,036.64.
During this past week, we have seen rudeness and ingratitude by some of our neighbors while our Croton Board of Trustees has been a model of silent cowardice. You can go on Facebook and debate the merits and demerits of displaying the “thin red line” or “thin blue line” flag on Croton fire apparatus, but calling people who you don’t know “racist” because they fly a red line flag is unfair, illogical, and counterproductive. Let us leave that aside for a moment and simply address the cost of continuing this course of attack.
Nobody wants to work in a hostile environment, let alone as an unpaid volunteer. And being called a racist, and having your family called racist, is about as hostile a work environment as can exist these days. The mere charge of being a racist is enough to destroy your professional life.
When we smear the volunteer members of the Croton Fire Department as racists, we create an environment in which any sane person will resign. Some people in Croton are fine with this, and point to the fact that once we get paid firefighters in Croton, the Village Manager and Board of Trustees can “control” the firefighters, including their freedom of speech.
Some years ago, then-Mayor (and Croton Rotary member) Greg Schmidt remarked on the declining rate of volunteerism in our community. His concern was the day when a lack of volunteer firefighters leads to the need for a paid force. He said that Croton property taxes would rise so high that people would not be able to afford to live here, and it turns out that he was correct.
Fire Department benchmarks are set by the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA). According to NFPA 1710, minimum staffing levels per company are four persons on-duty. With five companies, NFPA minimum standard would require Croton to have 20 qualified firefighters on duty at all times. There are 168 hours in a week, so if each firefighter averaged a 40 hour week, that would be 4.2 firefighters times 20 slots, for a total of 84 firefighters on the village payroll.
“Volunteer members of the Croton Fire Department have served with honor and distinction for 129 years. They have saved property, saved lives, and made this community a better and safer place to live. They deserve better than the treatment they have received this past week.”
According to the NYFD recruitment website, starting pay with zero experience is $45,196 exclusive of overtime and holiday pay, and after five years the pay is over $100,000. Westchester firefighter salaries are much higher, and in Westchester towns and villages there is often a mix of paid and volunteer firefighters which makes it difficult to extrapolate to a situation where a village has an all-paid fire department.
Among smaller Westchester municipalities, 2018 salary data shows the 34 paid members of the Hartsdale FD averaged $164,192, with Mohegan Lake’s paid firefighters at $116,373. If Croton went to an all-paid force, a better comparison would be Yonkers (average $153,067) or New Rochelle ($123,332).
For purposes of estimating cost, let us use the New Rochelle number for average base salary in an all-paid fire department.
As municipal employees, paid firefighters are covered by the state pension system (NYSLRS) and the employer contribution rate is set under the police and fire sub-plan (PFRS). For obvious reasons, funding firefighter pensions is more expensive than funding office worker pensions. The PFRS rate for FY 2021-22 is 28.3 percent.
Assuming 84 firefighters averaging $123,332 and adding in the mandatory PFRS retirement contribution, we get a base salary cost of $158,234.96 per firefighter and a total labor cost (exclusive of healthcare) of $13,291,736.64.
Volunteer firefighters have limited insurance coverage for on-duty injuries. Firefighters also have an increased risk of cancer, which is why since 2019 the law requires them to be covered by the Volunteer Firefighter Cancer Benefit Program. Firefighters who are municipal employees would also get fire coverage from their employer (in this instance, the Village of Croton-on-Hudson).
Firefighter benefits would be negotiated under a union contract. For purposes of estimating cost, let us use the plan the village gave Leo Wiegman. Even back in 2014, that cost taxpayers $22,100 (The Gazette, April 24/30, 2014). Assume that the union negotiates coverage for a single firefighter that costs $8,000 and that married firefighters get the Leo Wiegman plan at $22,100.
Statistics show that firefighters are family-oriented and so even though they skew younger, their rates of marriage are significantly higher than the general population and health care premiums would reflect that higher rate of family plan coverage. Assuming 21 single plans and 63 family plans, health coverage will cost $1,560,300 per year.
So with 84 firefighters to provide 24/7/365 coverage, Croton would pay $14,852,036.64 in salary, pension, and healthcare insurance.
Croton residents could choose a reduced level of fire protection coverage with less than 84 firefighters, since NFPA 1710 is not a legal requirement. Leaving aside the issue of safety and response time, if Croton tries to cut corners it can subject itself to legal liability. Improper staffing that causes employee injury or death can subject Croton taxpayers to liability for OSHA violations, and a property owner or fire victim would also assert failure to maintain the standard of care as set by the cognizant national association. And bear in mind that having deliberately chosen to replace a volunteer force with government employees, no jury is going to cut the municipality any slack. Almost certainly some Croton fire stations would need to be closed and this would impact response time.
The argument that Croton can rely on mutual aid to compensate for cutbacks is based on a false premise. Mutual aid is rendered in support of colleagues in a neighboring fire department. For example, Croton firefighters may respond to a location where there is a HAZMAT situation requiring specialized expertise, and so they call upon Buchanan to provide HAZMAT equipment or personnel. Or there may be a fast-spreading fire and Buchanan calls upon Croton to send reinforcements, whereupon Ossining agrees to cover Croton while the CFD engine is up in Buchanan.
Mutual aid is a reflection of the firefighter ethos. It is not a substitute for taxpayers who will not fund their own fire department. We can’t have a skeleton fire department and rely on volunteer forces from neighboring communities to fill in the gap. There is no way Croton could afford to pay professional firefighters to provide the same coverage as our volunteer firefighters provide today. The question is how much safety we are willing to sacrifice.
Tax levy money accounts for $11,729,221 of the Village of Croton’s current $19,741,790 budget. Precise computations are a bit difficult since the fire district can vary from the tax levy district, but let us assume they are substantially congruent.
The property tax levy would have to increase to $26,581,257.64 and the Village of Croton budget would rise to $34,593,826.64. That would mean a permanent 126 percent increase in the village tax levy portion of your annual property tax. Even if you are so lacking in civility and decency that you brand your volunteer firefighter neighbors as “racist” in order to win an argument, it would seem that we all have a pecuniary self-interest in maintaining the volunteer Fire Department.
To date, none of our Croton elected officials has stepped up to defend our volunteer firefighters. The only elected official to speak out is a Board of Education Trustee, and he vehemently criticized the Croton Fire Department.
The silence of our Village Manager, Mayor, and Board of Trustees speaks volumes. I have more respect for the Board of Education Trustee: he at least is honest and is perfectly fine with dealing with any fallout from disbanding the Croton Fire Department. By contrast, our Board of Trustees expect that the volunteer firefighters will suck it up and continue to show up at 2am without pay. After they put out the fire, presumably they will head back home and go on Facebook to read the latest attacks calling them racists.
The Croton Board of Trustees should either support the volunteer firefighters, or not support them. In this case, silence is not acceptable. Standing by watching while CFD firefighters are attacked by residents is cynical even by the Board’s customary standard of politics.
It is telling that the sole Democratic Party elected official to speak out is a Board of Education trustee. There was a time in the 1950s and 60s when Democratic Party activists led the fight for freedom of speech: first in the civil rights struggle and then during the Vietnam War. Progressive Democrats battled school administrators and fulfilled the promise of the Constitution in cases like Tinker v. Des Moines Independent School District. Now in 2021, “progressive” Democrats sit on school boards enforcing conformity and squelching free speech in their communities.
Where once upon a time, public high school students read The Crucible and learned about Joe McCarthy, today’s students learn the importance of participating in “voluntary” Parkland walkouts. Where past students admired the courage of Mary Beth Tinker, today’s students are taught to recite the “correct” viewpoint.
Make no mistake about it, the nasty vicious discourse about volunteer firefighters you have seen this past week is heading for public schools across NY State. Few people have the courage to stand up, out of fear of being tarred as racist. A few generations ago, being called a communist meant you couldn’t work in Hollywood. Today being called a racist means you may not be able to work anywhere. If you are a student thinking of serving your community in the CFD Explorer program, being called racist means you won’t get into an Ivy and probably not even your safety school.
Fear of the woke mob was a likely factor in the recent lopsided 56-7 vote on NY Senate bill 4615. One of the few Senators courageous enough to criticize the bill brought up the matter of “thin blue line”, “thin red line” and "thin green line” hats being worn by students in defiance of school district policy. The response by the bill’s sponsor was that 4615 wouldn’t apply because it is the school district which determines if the student must remove their “thin blue line” hat.
If the issue of “thin blue line” flag display comes up before the Croton UFSD Board of Education, I have a depressing premonition that the school board will not come down on the side of free speech.
Croton’s volunteer firefighters have a history going back to 1892. That is six years before the Village of Croton was incorporated. Many of the current members are second or even third generation members. No organization is perfect, and none of us is perfect—not even Democratic Party officeholders. I have been a critic of the CFD, but I am not perfect either. We need to consider that our views may differ from our neighbors but that does not mean that we have to assume our neighbors are racists.
Give credit where credit is due—when your house is on fire at 2am on a frigid January night, it is the volunteers of the Croton Fire Department—warts and all—who come to the rescue and stop your house from burning to the ground.
Volunteer members of the Croton Fire Department have served with honor and distinction for 129 years. They have saved property, saved lives, and made this community a better and safer place to live. They deserve better than the treatment they have received this past week.
Paul Steinberg