SAN ANTONIO — The San Antonio Professional Firefighters Association is asking voters to support three petition issues to amend the current city charter.
Petition officials will be at early voting stations and at the polls on March 6, asking voters to sign.
"We're saying let the voters decide," said San Antonio Professional Firefights Association President Chris Steele.
The union says the San Antonio First Campaign is all about increasing transparency at City Hall — and they say it comes down to three different issues.
"Our response time is the highest level it's been. It's at 8 minutes and you have 6 minutes to live or die.There's a morale issue because our boss, the city manager, is fighting us instead of letting us get to the business of protecting the public so this first charter amendment kind of mimics state law and basically allows us instead of doing all this fighting, which is injurious to the health, safety, and welfare of the citizens, to just go to a third party arbitration and they'll decide," Steele said.
However, the fire department disagrees with some of those claims.
In a response from SAFD sent by the city:
No, the average response time for the Fire Department is currently 7:51. As recently as 2010, the average response time was over 9 minutes. We don’t have low morale. Our firefighters and paramedics are professionals who provide exceptional customer service to the people of San Antonio. Since 2010, continued improvements to dispatch protocols, five new fire stations that bring our total units to 54 engines, 20 ladder trucks (soon to be 21) and up to 42 ambulances during peak times, as well as various system-wide software upgrades have all resulted in, and will continue to contribute to, improved response times.
According to the city, a court-ordered mediator helped settle the contract with the police union.
Meditation with the fire union was not successful.
Another item on the San Antonio First Campaign focues on voter access when it comes to changing ordinances.
The union wants to change amount of time and signatures to what the state requires-- in this case they say changing an ordinance would require 20,000 signatures in 180 days.
The city says the charter requirement for an initiative/referendum/recall in San Antonio is 10 percent of registered voters during the most recent municipal election. Austin (10 percent of registered voters), Dallas (15 percent of registered voters), Fort Worth (20 percent of registered voters) and Houston (25 percent of votes cast) all have similar or greater requirements.
"Based on our surveys, the citizens want to be able to have more direct control over the ordinances that affect them," said Steele.
If the campaign gets enough signatures, the final item would place new limits on the salary and length of employment for the city manager.
Sheryl Sculley received a $75,000 bonus for her 2017 performance added to her $475,000 pay.
"We think that the city manager making 10 times the lowest paid city employee is still a good deal," Steele said.
According to the city the lowest paid full-time city employee makes $29,640 and they are part of the Step Pay Plan for annual pay increases.