Some closure on closures

At Mayor Dan Sullivan’s press conference last Friday unveiling his budget for 2010, he also announced that the rolling closures of Anchorage Fire Department apparatus would end on the first of the year. It was good news for concerned citizens who’ve become fans of the anonymously run AFDStatus.wordpress.com blog and the daily Facebook and Twitter announcements of which apparatus are shut down (the department officially declines to release that information on its own).

Tom Wescott, president of Anchorage Fire Fighters Union Local 1264, says, “I guess we’re pretty pleased overall with the way the budget’s looking, the things [Sullivan] said.” He points out that the new budget eliminates four more positions at AFD, but, he says, “on the other hand there’s certainly economic hurdles; it looks like the mayor got creative and found some solutions. A lot of us expected worse.”

According to Sarah Erkmann, spokesperson for the mayor’s office, they added $650,000 to AFD’s budget to end the rolling closures in 2010. The amount that those closures—which began during the brief Claman administration—saved is less clear. According to Wescott, you can get an idea looking at the overtime expenditures over the last few years. In 2008, there was $3,852,000 in overtime pay; in 2009 thus far, there’s been only $876,747 spent, Wescott says. That’s nearly $3 million less spent this year on overtime.

The decision to end the rolling closures, which were obviously saving the city a decent chunk of money, but at an unknown cost to public safety, may have been encouraged by a cursory look at a recent situation in Atlanta.

There’s a private company called the Insurance Services Office (ISO) that audits risks in different metropolitan areas for insurance companies, to help them figure out their rates. ISO uses a scale of 1 to 10: the lower the number, the safer the area, and the lower the insurance rates for home, business and property owners. Anchorage currently has an ISO rating of 2. So did Atlanta until earlier this summer, when firefighter furloughs and closed fire stations caused its ISO rating to drop from 2 to 4. According to a June Atlanta Journal-Constitution story, insurance companies estimated a five to six percent increase in homeowners’ insurance rates. Atlanta ended the furloughs and reopened the stations, and by September had regained a rating of 3, though it hopes to return to a 2 rating soon.

Georgia’s Insurance and Fire Safety Commissioner John Oxendine told the Journal-Constitution, “It is a message to other local governments that if you cut life and property funding, there might be consequences.”

By ending the rolling closures, hopefully Anchorage will dodge those consequences.

bjk@anchoragepress.com