The District’s fire chief on Monday accused the D.C. Council member with oversight of public safety of slighting his department and caring little about the community’s welfare.
The rocky relationship between Fire and Emergency Medical Services Chief Dennis Rubin and at-large Councilman Phil Mendelson, chairman of the public safety committee, further devolved during the latest in a series of oversight hearings, as the two men went after each other over the department’s burgeoning budget, overtime spending and threatened cuts.
Mendelson charged that Rubin “blew away” his overtime spending this year — FEMS is on track to pay more than $11 million this year in overtime when it was budgeted for $5 million — despite council approval of a multimillion-dollar budget increase between fiscal 2008 and 2009.
Rubin responded, angrily, that Mendelson’s committee “arbitrarily and capriciously” cut Mayor Adrian Fenty’s proposed fire budget by $2.9 million in 2009 and $2.8 million in 2010, making it virtually impossible to fully staff his agency and reduce overtime expenses.
“We have done an absolute outstanding job with no acknowledgment or support from you,” Rubin said. “And the feeling that there’s some magic formula of what you can cut [from] the fire department to provide ambulance and medical services and fire service, it just defies logic.”
More than 80 percent of the fire department’s 159 vacancies are either frozen or unfunded, the chief said, “unless you want us to shut down fire stations or remove ambulances from response duty.”
Mendelson accused Rubin of omitting critical information in his “self-serving” testimony. While the chief complains about budget “cuts,” the councilman said, the budget for FEMS has risen from $179 million in 2008 to $189.5 million in 2010. And while Rubin quibbles about the inability to hire new people, Mendelson said, he fails to mention the 246 employees who’ve left their jobs since 2007.
Terry Lynch, executive director of the Downtown Cluster of Congregations, said the bickering “has become counterproductive … and the public’s paying the price.”
