Budget cuts

The mayor came out and announced his plan this week for cutting the city's budget to cover the $8 million budget gap that has grown to $14 million. Once the announcement hit, it only took hours before a TRO was filed.
One of the cost cutting measures that he announced was in the Fire Department. He said that they will be taking one apparatus out of service and reshuffling the firefighters from that apparatus to cover other areas and times. The problem with this is that in his usual ready, fire, aim method of governance, he forgot to check and see if that would be a violation of the Firefighters' Local 92 contract.
According to the folks at the union, it is. Their contract says that the city must keep a manpower level of 103 line personne each dayl. Unfortunately for Carty, a chunk of his plan's savings comes from the fact that the city would only have 99 line personnel each day.
In general, I'm not a big fan of unions, and to be really truthful, I'm not sure that four people in a city the size of Toledo is that significant, so I'm not sure how much it would jeopardize safety. The apparatus taken out of service would be a ladder truck, which Local 92 reps say would slow response time. I'll give that a maybe bordering on a probably, but again, we have a number of them in service at any given time, so I'm not sure how much it would change things.
What I see as more telling is that this is indicative of Carty's failure to know how things work in the city he's been charged to run and his attempts to short circuit the system. We don't know, Local 92 may have been able to work something out with the city. Perhaps there was a way to reorganize and move some people around to hold the 103.
Had the mayor bothered to talk to them, it might have been worked out. Now, with the city in a time of economic peril as the mayor put it, the city will be spending those precious dollars on lawyers to deal with this. To add insult to injury, if the mayor's past performance is any indicator, the money will go to outside lawyers instead of the ones that the city already employs.