Hard times, hard choices

The increasingly fractious world of public-sector unions has come even to the Flathead Valley.

Kalispell firefighters, fresh off a stunning arbitration triumph that backed them on all points in union contract negotiations, found out last week that seven of their force may be laid off because of the cost of that contract victory.

City officials, stung by the adverse arbitrator’s ruling, say the layoffs and possible outsourcing of the city-run ambulance service may be the only ways to deal with what the city expects to be a $690,000 hit to the budget over the next three years.

Firefighters counter that the city’s numbers are way off base and the new contract will cost only half what the city figures.

The city says the money’s not there to pay annual raises of up to $6,000 for individual firefighters. The firefighters retort that the city does, too, have the money and should pay up or public safety will suffer.

Rhetoric and blood pressures, predictably, are rising on both sides in this dispute.

While we sympathize with firefighters about to lose their jobs, we also recognize (and perhaps the union should, too) that public coffers are not bottomless.

Particularly in these treacherous economic times, the public has been demanding austerity for government spending. That austerity sometimes can be painful on a personal level — but members of the taxpaying public have had to endure their own austerity with years of pay cuts, pay freezes and thousands of lost jobs.

If you saw the chart of Kalispell public employees’ salaries that was published in the Inter Lake on Wednesday, you may well have seen the scope of the problem. Government salaries, largely across the board, are higher than those in the private sector. When there was enough money to go around, that may have been fine. But hard times call for hard decisions. That’s what is taking place now.

As we noted, it’s possible that Kalispell will try to outsource its ambulance service in addition to losing almost a fourth of its firefighter/paramedic force.

Being fiscally responsible sometimes means making decisions that have difficult consequences for even the most-respected government employees such as firefighters.

But no matter how these issues are spun politically, we’re confident elected city officials are taking seriously not only their budget responsibilities but also their responsibilities to protect and serve the community.