Serving because the thirty fifth commissioner of the FDNY was the honour of a lifetime. We completed a lot throughout a really quick tenure, setting this nice division up for operational success for generations to come back.
However one nagging problem that has not been settled: a contract for FDNY’s Bureau of Emergency Medical Providers.
Pay for members of the division doesn’t fall throughout the fireplace commissioner’s purview, however let me be clear: FDNY EMTs and paramedics deserve a monumental pay increase that displays the important significance of their work.
New Yorkers don’t suppose twice concerning the women and men who arrive after they dial 911 — they simply anticipate assistance will come.
Too few are speaking a few looming disaster in public security that the incoming administration should handle: pre-hospital emergency care in New York Metropolis.
Except we discover pragmatic options to enhance compensation for members of EMS, the system that saves lives each single day will collapse.
EMS is the way forward for the FDNY. Each single day, EMTs carry out a fancy, emotionally demanding, technically refined job underneath extraordinary stress.
Enhancing their pay requires compromise and a willingness to embrace options that really work.
That brings us to the present crossroads.
The Metropolis Council lately toyed with the thought of separating EMS from the FDNY, making a standalone company.
It was rightly tossed, as a result of whereas that will sound like an easy path to enhancing EMS, it could have been a detour — one paved with unintended penalties, tens of hundreds of thousands in redundant prices and a diminished capability to offer well timed, efficient medical care.
It could duplicate each operate that retains the FDNY operating, and worse but would undermine the built-in emergency response system that retains New Yorkers protected.
And it could not meaningfully handle the precise problem at hand: compensation.
Right here, we should confront one other uncomfortable reality: EMS union leaders haven’t served their members effectively by refusing to compromise with Metropolis Corridor.
Their unwillingness to go to arbitration, and their insistence on reaching full “parity” with firefighters — which has one way or the other change into the immovable middle of the EMS union’s negotiation technique — has halted all progress.
Metropolis authorities operates with finite assets, and the incoming administration might want to work intently with the Metropolis Council to ship for EMS.
Day by day spent locked in uncompromising negotiations is a day that EMTs and paramedics earn far lower than they deserve.
In the meantime, the workforce is burning out.
The division loses proficient EMTs and paramedics in nice numbers not as a result of they don’t love the job, however as a result of what they’re paid doesn’t match the vital nature of their work.
If it stays on this path, FDNY EMS faces a way forward for worsening staffing shortages and slowing response occasions — because the system creaks underneath the load of issues that may very well be solved if solely union leaders targeted on options, not symbolic victories.
This isn’t theoretical. That is our actuality.
We have now a alternative: Leaders can proceed down a path of bureaucratic enlargement and inflexible negotiating positions because the pre-hospital emergency care system crumbles.
Or they’ll select a solutions-oriented path that really helps these frontline heroes.
To the incoming mayoral administration, I say this: Heed the warning.
The system that responds to New Yorkers’ medical emergencies, from automobile crashes and burns to your family members’ coronary heart assaults, is in peril.
Not as a result of a scarcity of dedication from its members or imaginative and prescient from the FDNY, however as a result of the individuals on the negotiating desk received’t have interaction within the sensible problem-solving wanted to repair it.
To EMTs and paramedics, I say: You deserve higher.
Higher pay, higher gear, higher working situations and illustration that places your wants first.
And to the unions representing EMS, I say this not as an adversary however as a business-minded CEO who desires the identical final result you do: The trail you’re on is just not delivering outcomes to your members. Parity can’t be the one horizon.
Compromise is just not give up — it’s the mechanism by which progress is achieved.
Our shared purpose is straightforward: present the best customary of emergency care to each New Yorker, each single day.
To try this, we should put money into what strengthens EMS: its individuals.
We should streamline, not duplicate.
We should negotiate, not stalemate.
We should prioritize what works, not what merely sounds good.
New York Metropolis’s EMS system can stay the nationwide mannequin for city pre-hospital care.
However that solely occurs if leaders select pragmatism over politics, collaboration over battle and progress over parity.
Robert Tucker is the previous commissioner of the Fireplace Division of the Metropolis of New York.
