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One Leg of the Table - The Collapse of Government Services
RedTide
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
There are a lot of expectations heaped upon our government(s); federal, state and local, that at least a majority of the population feel their elected officials are charged with overseeing. Protection of personal freedoms and liberties, protection of property, disaster relief and security both national and local. There's also "lesser" services such as a post office, public education, trash collection, clean water and the like that may not be as essential but are still expected by the populace.
The recent economic crash and downturn has had almost a universally negative effect on these services and now that we have started moving back in the right direction we have a chance to survey the damage that has been done in the last few years.
What has been the effect of slashed budgets, furloughs and layoffs on government services?
What does this mean for the populace have seen little to no decrease in their tax burdens (on the local level many have seen their taxes go up even), but may be noticing minor to severe effects on their quality of life?
We have a good handful of civil servants on this forum and of course plenty of citizens who are familiar with whats going on in their own backyards. Have things started moving back to the pre-recession normal? Have things gotten better? or is the slide still on going? While I feel like things may be pretty firmly anecdotal anyone who has hard data is always welcome to share.
My Piece:
I'll start things off by talking (and showing) a little bit about the fire service. Wholly essential in modern society, your modern fire department may be responsible for a whole host of duties from fire suppression, inspections, EMT medical services, paramedics and rescuing your average citizens from fires, auto wrecks, building collapses, trenches and swift water/flood situations. And if the growing trend continues, all of the fire department jobs lost in the last four years either aren't coming back or are facing overall reductions in staffing from their pre-recession levels. And as recent events have shown (Hurricanes, wildfires, the continued existence of Detroit) the need for them is just as great if not greater.
Here is a video about the East Saint Louis, Illinois Fire Department:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKKY7jU0eEA
It's a little lengthy (at 9 minutes) but it touches on their history of firehouse closures, current staffing problems and shows both the volume and intensity of the fires they face almost daily. Full on urban decay and the erosion of government services at its worst.
Detroit: And here's a link to a trailer (for a documentary) that just came out detailing the troubles that the fire service in Detroit has been facing for the better part of two decades now.
The recent economic crash and downturn has had almost a universally negative effect on these services and now that we have started moving back in the right direction we have a chance to survey the damage that has been done in the last few years.
What has been the effect of slashed budgets, furloughs and layoffs on government services?
What does this mean for the populace have seen little to no decrease in their tax burdens (on the local level many have seen their taxes go up even), but may be noticing minor to severe effects on their quality of life?
We have a good handful of civil servants on this forum and of course plenty of citizens who are familiar with whats going on in their own backyards. Have things started moving back to the pre-recession normal? Have things gotten better? or is the slide still on going? While I feel like things may be pretty firmly anecdotal anyone who has hard data is always welcome to share.
My Piece:
I'll start things off by talking (and showing) a little bit about the fire service. Wholly essential in modern society, your modern fire department may be responsible for a whole host of duties from fire suppression, inspections, EMT medical services, paramedics and rescuing your average citizens from fires, auto wrecks, building collapses, trenches and swift water/flood situations. And if the growing trend continues, all of the fire department jobs lost in the last four years either aren't coming back or are facing overall reductions in staffing from their pre-recession levels. And as recent events have shown (Hurricanes, wildfires, the continued existence of Detroit) the need for them is just as great if not greater.
Here is a video about the East Saint Louis, Illinois Fire Department:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKKY7jU0eEAIt's a little lengthy (at 9 minutes) but it touches on their history of firehouse closures, current staffing problems and shows both the volume and intensity of the fires they face almost daily. Full on urban decay and the erosion of government services at its worst.
Detroit: And here's a link to a trailer (for a documentary) that just came out detailing the troubles that the fire service in Detroit has been facing for the better part of two decades now.
RedTide#1907 on Battle.net
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I mean, outside of salaries, pensions, and health coverage, you basically have uniforms, upkeep, hoses, trucks, etc, and then rent as your main costs, right?
And when Local Ladder 2 only buys four uniforms a year, those costs are going to be a lot higher than if the entire government were purchasing uniforms in bulk, right?
Just spitballing.
I think Fire, like Police, is something we shouldn't really be letting go broke, and really need to reprioritize.
How many Fire Depts could we fund from efficiency cuts in Defense spending?
Well, it's a question that has to be answered. If the cost is infinite, then we should have zero firemen, the cost is too great.
Like, outside of ignorance and politics, GDP is slowly growing, revenues are slowly increasing, deficits are falling pretty handily.
Can't/Shouldn't we wait it out?
I think some American jurisdictions do pay other jurisdictions to handle their fire services for this reason.
But salaries, pensions, and health coverage are the bulk of the costs. Fire-trucks are expensive, but not as expensive as people in any first-world state.
Yeah, I know it wouldn't be the majority of the cost or anything.
I have no idea what the actual numbers are.
Fire and it's spread is easily modeled mathematically. If you don't STOP the fires, then eventually a fire will reach critical volume and destroy the city. Having no firefighters is not an option, and there is a critically low level of firefighters where they are no better than no firefighters since their response time/reliability will become bad enough that a good percentage of fires will have a chance to grow to their maximum extent.
Budget concerns are a lie, just like trickle down economics.
not as many as you would think.
defense spending works exactly like you just mentioned where the more you buy, the cheaper it is per unit.
It depends what you mean by efficiency. If by efficiency you mean 'cuts to the army that would reduce it to a sensible level for national defence, say 50% bigger than the next biggest army' then we could fund every fire department in the country ten times over and have them fly to their fires in F22s.
Hence my first post.
Civilian emergency response is an area that is easily compromised by privatization and reliance on contractors, in part because private entities can willingly invest in additional parallel private services when they want faster or more specific kinds of responses that the public service do not specialize in, which then creates the institutional practice of private emergency response. And fire mitigation technology only encourages this - the less likely it is that fires form a collective threat, the lower the support by the wealthy to fund collective fire prevention.
we are far beyond the time where having the biggest army mattered. we also don't have the largest.
We do in dollars spent, though.
I think that's what he was referring to.
Private emergency response can be much more cost efficient when its only concern is body recovery and scene cleanup. A private entity having the facilities in place to guarantee its ability to have responders on scene in a timely fashion and you know, actually make money would most likely end up being wildly more expensive then going the public route. Like every other privatization scam sold over the last 30 years.
The best way for a lot of the country (excluding rural areas) is to make a shift towards regional departments that have actually been well researched and planned in regards to location of facilities in regards to response time/areas of high volume of incidents/etc. Outside of initial growing pains, its almost all upside. Hell I think the same is really true for most police departments as well. Keystone, Mayberry and Milwaukee all having a Chief of Police getting paid 100k a year to manage 12 cops is comically redundant.
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Smoke detectors being mandated and the eventuality of residential sprinklers having the same force of law behind them have/will both do a lot to curb residential fire fatalities. But even residential sprinklers are far from a replacement of an actual fire crew making sure that the fire actually goes out and your family is safe.
There is also all of the other services I mentioned earlier that the Fire Service has grown into over the years that I mentioned before that are pretty valuable in this modern era.
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yes but we also have more money than most other countries
as a percentage of GDP, we spend ~3-4% on defense
funding firefighters shouldn't be an issue with how much money the US rakes in. no one cut firefighters to pay for F22s for instance.
At least in NY, and I suspect in lots of other states, the problem is as ever the mother fucking Boomers. In this case it's that they massively underfunded the generous pensions they handed out and are now coming due. Pretty much every not NYC city in NY is in massive financial problems because they have huge pension liabilities and declining tax revenues.
Yea, I just find it a bit depressing. More so since I suspect the most obvious metric that experienced firemen would excel at over inexperienced would be survival rate.
Traditionally fire fighters and police have been relatively insulated due to necessity, being the last things cut, but quite a few areas were so badly hit they need to basically cut almost everything.
This is not about cutting firemen to pay for jets, it is about cutting one thing in a city that is getting poorer and then five things in a neighboring city that is getting even worse, while a third city doesn't have to cut anything because it is still not badly effected. The local funding model broke down and was not replaced with state or federal funds.
Honestly, it seems like pensions and what to do with them are the biggest economic issue of the first world.