City: Sobering picture of economics, facts led to firefighter choice

Dec. 09--"Fire cuts," as signs seen around the city refer to them, have been the hottest topic of debate for Meadville City Council since City Manager Andy Walker first presented the proposed 2017 budget to council on Nov. 2.

An aggressive public relations effort in the ensuing five weeks has led to firefighters giving out nearly 500 signs while collecting even more petition signatures, according to Lt. Joe Smock, former vice president of Local 515, the firefighters' union.

The opposition mounted by firefighters and their allies has often appealed to the emotions of residents and council members alike, with much of the focus on safety for firefighters and residents alike.

On Wednesday, city officials responded to the heated emotion shown by firefighters and their supporters with a flood of sobering facts and economic logic before several council members injected some emotionally charged comments of their own into the debate.

By the time it was over, several members of council had directed their ire at an extensive cast of the usual suspects at budget time. The state legislature, leading nonprofit institutions in the city, neighboring townships with low tax rates and lower levels of fire and police protection -- even the spouses of firefighters posting on social media had come up for criticism.

"The state legislature has got to do something about nonprofits not paying taxes," said Councilwoman Nancy Mangilo Bittner stared into the crowd that had moments before cheered each of the 11 residents and taxpayers who spoke in opposition to fire department cuts. "Unfortunately, we're the nonprofit capital of the world -- and they don't (pay taxes)."

"I would love to have a nonprofit give us a gift of half a million dollars," Mangilo Bittner said.

"It is absolutely not fair that 2,500 people who go to Allegheny College do not contribute at all," Councilman John Battaglia said.

"We have no say over how much we pay you," Battaglia said directly to firefighters in the audience. Firefighter salaries are determined through collective bargaining.

"But we do have something to say about how many people you have," Battaglia added. "We don't like (making cuts). We don't like it at all. There's just not enough dollars to go around."

Councilman Sean Donahue was one of several who sought to extinguish concerns about insurance rates being affected by staff cuts. "Insurance rates are not based on how many people you have on a shift," he said.

Mayor LeRoy Stearns told the audience that the biggest mistake he had seen in his 18 years on council was "when we allowed our paid staff to leave ... and live outside the city of Meadville." Six of the current 12 firefighters live outside the city and thus would not be affected by tax increases they are asking Meadville residents to shoulder, according to Stearns.

Stearns went on to say that while he does not take controversies like these personally, he was frustrated by criticism appearing online that he saw as unfair.

"I don't like being stabbed in the back by your spouses," he told the firefighters.

Where firefighters earlier had raised the issue of safety and the possibility of deaths to firefighters or residents as the result of staff cuts, council members raised the specter of a kind of urban death -- Act 47, the state law that covers financially distressed municipalities. Unless something is done, council members suggested, the city could eventually face bankruptcy.

"We're not going to head in that direction," Stearns insisted.

Amidst the emotion on both sides, Walker laid out a sobering picture of Meadville in economic decline.

The city's population is shrinking and getting older, he said. At the same time, the portion of residents older than 65 is on the rise. Walker said 18 percent of the city's population is over 65. Thus, there are fewer people to pay property taxes and more of them find it difficult to do so because they are on fixed incomes.

In addition, the city faces the challenge of high poverty, Walker said. Nearly 40 percent of city households receive social security. Nearly 26 percent of city households received food stamps in 2014, according to Walker. Nationally, the average is about 18.6 percent of households.

Households earning less than $25,000 in annual income made up 40 percent of the city in 2014, Walker said, with 65 percent of the households under $50,000. A quarter of the city's population was living in poverty in 2014, according to Walker.

Despite these challenges, Walker said, Meadville has maintained significantly higher levels of fire protections services than comparable municipalities in the region.

Following the meeting Cpt. Jill Staaf, the newly elected president of Local 515, said that she felt Meadville residents would be willing to pay higher taxes if it came to that. After all, she had just turned over more than 2,200 signatures on petitions opposing cuts to the fire department during the council meeting.

But during the meeting Mangilo Bittner all but dismissed those signatures. Only a fraction had been supplied before the meeting, she said, and of those merely 39 were from Meadville property owners.

Mangilo Bittner said she had received "five or six letters and a bunch of phone calls from people saying please don't raise my taxes."

"I represent the property tax payers in the city of Meadville," she said.

Mike Crowley can be reached at 724-6370 or by email at [email protected].

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