Firefighters call for more cadets to address safety, mental health needs

The Austin Firefighters Association is seeking more attention to the safety issues facing its membership, which were discussed in part last week during City Council budget sessions.

The AFA had planned to hold a press conference Monday to publicize issues such as increasing injury rates and mental health concerns highlighted by a recent death by suicide of one of its members, marking the fourth such death for the organization since 2017.

The press conference was postponed because of President Joe Biden’s visit to the LBJ Presidential Library on Monday. Association President Bob Nicks told the Austin Monitor he and other advocates for Austin firefighters are pushing the city to add another annual cadet class to begin adding the 25 new positions needed to accommodate a planned one-hour reduction to the typical firefighter’s workweek.

Nicks said that reducing the workweek to 52 hours will reduce some of the mental strain and psychological effects of the demanding and dangerous job.

“It’s an emerging problem across the nation where firefighters are suffering more from post-incident stress. But it seems to be really a big problem in Austin. We’re having more and more people treated for it through conventional, non-conventional means,” Nicks said. “The reason we’re trying to get a workweek reduction is so we can put more time between shifts where firefighters can rest and kind of reset and be rested and ready when they come back to work. Their current schedule doesn’t seem to allow that.”

During last week’s budget hearing, Council members discussed with financial and fire staff how to pay for the $1.7 million cost of adding a third cadet class to the next budget year. An area of concern was how to account for the Fire Department’s rising workers’ compensation costs due to abnormally high absences and overtime costs due to injuries.

“It seems to me that having more (full-time employees) might be a more cost-efficient and better for the mental health and well-being of our firefighters,” Council Member Alison Alter said. “I wanted to understand if we had had done the math to figure out whether we would be better off adding, say, another 10 or 15 or 20 firefighters, rather than paying an extra $4 million in overtime in terms of how we’re budgeting moving forward … as well as reduce the workload burden on our firefighters.”

Nicks said part of the increase in overtime costs could be attributed to firefighters becoming more willing to acknowledge their mental health issues or physical ailments that require rest and medical intervention. He said the workweek restructuring, which is scheduled to go into effect in September 2025, would help to alleviate some of those problems.

“The fire services has had kind of a stigma that you’re afraid to talk about (mental health). Or somebody may relieve you of your duty, and you couldn’t be a firefighter anymore. For many, many years, it was something that people did not talk about at all,” he said. “We’re starting to have more and more people going off duty, basically on injury leave or for post-traumatic stress syndrome. The management has turned a corner and they’re starting to recognize it more and they’re actually very good about helping in that treatment.”

Council Member Mackenzie Kelly said she’d had extensive conversations with Fire Department managers and friends after the news of the most recent suicide and said she strongly supports the shift to a shortened workweek. Her main concern with the expenses for an extra cadet class is where staff would find that money. Kelly highlighted assorted classes and programs in the Parks and Recreation Department that could be cut.

“The way that the firefighters currently work, it’s 24 (hours) on, 48 (hours) off. Their shift change is at noon. So you go from noon one day to noon the next day,” she said. “By the time the firefighters get home, if they have families or kids are getting home from school in the afternoon, they don’t have a lot of time to really decompress before their at-home life has to begin.”

Photo made available through a Creative Commons license.

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