Santa Maria Firefighters Local 2020 members planned to attend the May 21 City Council preliminary budget meeting to advocate that the city use its Measure U funds to increase firefighter salaries, Local 2020 Public Information Officer Chris Robles told the Sun.
“Our position is that it’s a matter of priorities,” Robles said. “It doesn’t take very much for the council to say we need to maintain [services], which is what they promised with Measure U funds. When they sold that to the community and the community taxed itself, they were promised in the literature that it would be to maintain and enhance public safety, and that includes fire.”
However, the city’s proposed 2024-26 biennial budget shows a “significant structural imbalance” within the General Fund and Measure U—with ongoing expenditures in the general fund and Measure U combined exceed the ongoing revenue by $17.4 million in 2024-25 and $19.9 million in 2025-26, according to a staff report for the May 21 meeting. The proposed budget is $354.9 million in all operating funds across 10 departments, Public Information Officer Mark van de Kamp said in a statement.
“The city is no different from many other cities in facing serious financial challenges. The city will continue to move forward with downtown revitalization, keep the peace, grow more businesses and wonderful programs and services for residents,” the staff report said. “In addition, the goals for the coming year are to balance the budget and retain and recruit the best talent possible, all while becoming even more efficient.”
Measure U’s proposed investments for the Fire Department during the 2024-25 fiscal year include parking lot maintenance, building maintenance, a Fire Station 1 remodel, a training center, radios, division equipment, and vehicles, according to city documents
Robles argued that these priorities should include the firefighters’ salaries and that the city has the funds in reserves in order to invest in those performing public service.
“They prioritize buildings, they’re very proud of building all of these buildings, but buildings don’t provide services, people do,” he said. “Since they’re going into these budget discussions and projecting doom and gloom, that’s another tactic for negotiations. They can say, ‘Look we don’t have the money.’”
Santa Maria and the firefighters union, which represents 57 firefighters, captains, engineers, and fire inspectors, first entered negotiations in November 2023 before the contract expired in December. After three contract offers and no agreement, the city declared an impasse—a procedure that requires the employer to go through a mediation and fact-finding process before imposing a last, best, and final offer to the bargaining group.
“There’s threats to impose, but they seem to have backed off of that,” Robles said. “I can say emphatically that Local 2020 has been and continues to be willing to sit down and work things out, but as time goes on and gets into the next budget year, the average pay is shifting.”
Santa Maria firefighters are the second lowest paid fire department in the Tri-Counties area, creating retention and recruitment issues for the department managing Santa Barbara County’s largest city, according to previous Sun reporting. While advocating for higher pay, firefighters have been adamant about using Measure U—a sales tax measure dedicated to enhancing public safety—toward salaries instead of one-time projects.
“The city is making this worse every time they fail to adequately pay their firefighters because other communities continue to raise the bar, and it’s going to take Santa Maria that much more to catch up so they need to fix this,” Robles said. “I equate it to plumbing in your house: If you continue to ignore a leak or rattle … it becomes an emergency fix that costs far more than if you dealt with it in the beginning; that’s where they are.
“They are on the verge of a serious problem.”
This article appears in May 23 – Jun 2, 2024.
