If I told you that seven close-knit organizations were considering merging certain services for purposes that involve mutual support, regular sleepovers, and cost savings, would you guess I was talking about:
- The “Seven Sisters” colleges merging their women’s studies programs, or
- Seven cities in St. Louis County merging their fire departments?
You could understandably guess A, but since I am writing about it you probably know it is B.
Olivette, Clayton, Richmond Heights, Maplewood, Webster Groves, Shrewsbury, and University City have launched a study to consider whether merging their individual fire departments would be a beneficial move. (As an aside, it is worth noting that University City has four streets named after a “Seven Sisters” school.)
The economic and political science literature on local government mergers is cautious. In one major literature review of studies of municipal mergers from dozens of counties, the author came to a few primary conclusions. First, cost savings from mergers do happen, but they are usually much smaller than predicted. Second, public services may be improved through having greater municipal resources, but this often results in a larger bureaucracy that limits potential cost savings. (The third main conclusion doesn’t apply in this instance.)
One of the main reasons cost savings are smaller than predicted is because governments rarely have the willingness to fire employees in mergers, so redundancies are maintained at first. Cost savings tend to come from attrition as redundant positions are not filled over time. That is indeed what happened when several fire districts merged in Oregon in the 1990s, where all reductions in employment came through attrition. But over time, there were some cost savings.
Another reason why local government mergers don’t save as much as promised is that everybody is moved up. If City A pays trash collectors more than City B, and City B pays their clerks more than City A, both sets of employees get moved up to the higher salary spot. That could certainly happen here. For these seven cities, the lowest median fireman salary is in Shrewsbury, at $83,668. The highest median salary is in Maplewood, at $117,873. Do you think the combined department will have a median salary closer to Shrewsbury or closer to Maplewood after negotiations with the union? According to the story in the Post-Dispatch, the union certainly likes its odds here:
There’s another reason the union supports a regional fire department — bargaining power.
Instead of negotiating seven separate contracts, which has sometimes led to conflicts between firefighters unions and city administrators, the union would negotiate just one contract with the fire authority. And it would have a chance to standardize pay and benefits.
The main reason I am supportive of this effort to study the merging of fire departments is because of what it is not. It is not an attempt to merge the fire services into a new, independent fire district. That has also been proposed, and it would be a terrible idea. The various firefighters’ unions prefer fire districts because they are easier for the fire union to control, although unions are certainly influential in cities with fire departments, too. Fire districts elect their board members in April elections that get very little attention, and their board members are only concerned with managing the fire district. Union support for these obscure votes is vital. With municipal fire departments, the local races, particularly the races for mayor, get more public attention. More importantly, the revenues and costs of operating the fire department must be shared as part of the revenues and costs of operating the entire city. Elected officials in a municipality have to operate the fire department within the overall revenues and budgets of the larger city. If these cities merged into a shared fire department, the cities would still be funding the departments. That’s a good thing.
Overall, I think there is reason to be optimistic about these proposed changes. If I have to pick between a regional fire department or a new fire district, I’m going with the department.
