Controversies abound, but fire union holds line against changes

Hundreds of Boston firefighters picketed during Mayor Thomas M. Menino's 2001 State of the City address. (MATTHEW J. LEE/GLOBE STAFF/FILE)

They recently faced allegations of drinking on the job, cheating on a civil service exam, and defrauding the system to inflate their pensions. But if the public image of firefighters has suffered, they are not letting it get in the way of plans for a demonstration outside Mayor Thomas M. Menino's State of the City speech tonight to pressure the city for higher wages.

It is not the first time firefighters have been so bold. For more than a decade, their union has repeatedly won lucrative contracts and dodged attempts to impose reforms on issues ranging from random drug and alcohol testing policies to vehicle maintenance.

Firefighters remain one of the city's most powerful constituencies, a union that no city politician wants to take on. Firefighters enjoy a public image that is considered unimpeachably heroic. Criticizing them is equated by many office-holders in Boston to political suicide.

"The firefighter unions, the police unions are very politically savvy, and they can take even the mildest criticism and turn it into 'you're anti-public-safety, antifirefighter,' " said Michael McCormack, a former city councilor and a lawyer who remains active in city affairs.

Even Boston's famously bullying mayor seems to don kid gloves when grappling with the firefighters' union.

"There's a lot of good firefighters, too," Menino commented last week when asked by reporters about the thorny negotiations.

The firefighters' union has opposed dozens of proposals over the past 10 years, primarily by asking for more pay in exchange for each change. City officials admit they have backed down in the face of such demands.

For example, firefighters have asked for raises in exchange for submitting to annual physicals and for allowing the city to use civilians in the maintenance of fire apparatus. The union has also refused to agree to random drug and alcohol testing, which the powerful Police Patrolmen's Association allowed in 1999 in exchange for a bump in pay. Random drug and alcohol testing has returned as an urgent issue in the current round of negotiations after drugs or alcohol were found in the blood of two firefighters killed in a West Roxbury fire.

Drug testing, along with annual physicals and equipment maintenance by civilians, was recommended by an outside review of the department in 2000.

Menino, who vowed to impose reforms on the Fire Department shortly after he was elected mayor in 1993, more recently had all but given up on making sweeping changes.

"In all practicality, it's very difficult to achieve," Menino said in an interview last fall. "You want to see this happen, but you [come] to understand there are other things that can be done much easier."

The mayor said that if he dug in his heels and demanded all the changes at once, the ensuing face-off would be untenably protracted and nasty.

"How long would that take us?" Menino said in the fall.

After 18 months working without a contract, Edward A. Kelly, president of the firefighters' union, said last week that the organization had no other choice but to take on the city.

"We try and negotiate in good faith, but the city doesn't," he said. "That forces us to use other means."

The embattled union recently hired a New York public relations firm, Sheinkopf Communications.

"The union's number one concern has always been and will always be the safety of the city of Boston," said Austin Shafran, a Sheinkopf employee who is acting as a spokesman for the union. He called recent news reports about firefighters cheating on a civil service test and inflating their pensions one-sided and unfounded. "No politician supporting those charges would want to be the one running into a burning building," Shafran said.

Last week, the Globe reported that between 2001 and 2007, 102 firefighters were granted tax-free and substantially higher accidental disability pensions after reporting on-the-job injuries while they were substituting for their superiors at higher pay.

State officials are investigating whether Boston firefighters cheated on a civil service promotional exam by taking turns going to the bathroom and sending answers on text messages to their colleagues.

Last October brought the dark news that autopsy results showed one firefighter was legally drunk and another had cocaine in his system when they died fighting a West Roxbury restaurant fire in August.

Kelly downplayed recent headlines, saying negative stories were planted by City Hall as part of a strategy to attempt to weaken the union.

"The city's strategy is to weaken our public image," Kelly said. "This administration will bully you. You have to stand up and fight."

And fight they will. Last week the union applied for a permit to rally outside Menino's State of the City address, a formal occasion attended by dignitaries including the governor. At a similar picket seven years ago, angry hordes of firefighters crowded outside the event, shouting at Menino and, allegedly, spitting at his daughter. That year, the mayor was facing an election challenge during the heat of contract talks. In 2004, he was staring down a threat of protests during his city's showcase, the Democratic National Convention.

Some critics of the union called its planned rally outrageous and said that, given recent reports of cheating and other abuses, they were surprised that the union continues to employ the hardball tactics it has used in the past.

"It's almost as if their strategy is to try to bully the mayor into a new contract," said Samuel R. Tyler, president of the Boston Municipal Research Bureau, a business-funded watchdog group that has pushed for fire contract reforms. But recent experience might have taught the union leaders that the tactic works, he said.

Menino has been visibly irritated by firefighter union tactics over the years. But his administration has repeatedly awarded lucrative contracts.

And while independent reviews have highlighted the Fire Department's shortcomings for years, little has been done to reform it. In October, a Globe review found that the city has failed to adopt dozens of recommendations to overhaul the department. The inaction has cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars in what independent auditors identified as wasteful spending.

"There really has been no elected official willing to make changes or take on the Fire Department," said Jeffrey W. Conley, head of the Boston Finance Commission, an independent city agency that recommended changes as far back as 1994. "It's always easier to go along and get along."

While critics fault the latest administration for not doing more to tackle the intractable problems of the department, Menino seems to think he has done plenty and has suffered the wrath of the angry firefighters for it.

"We've got some things out of them: exempt positions, light duty when someone is hurt, the sick leave piece," he said in an interview with the Globe on Friday. "But it's slow progress. That's more reforms than we got in 30 years beforehand."

Nor are there reverberations in the chambers of Boston City Council, where members who typically clamor for attention did not return calls about the firefighters union on Friday. Neither Council President Maureen Feeney of Dorchester nor Councilor at Large Michael F. Flaherty or Councilor John R. Connolly, who both called for random drug and alcohol testing for firefighters, would talk about the union last week.

And in last year's council race, only four of nine candidates said they would demand that the firefighters' contract allow random drug and alcohol screening.

Donovan Slack of the Globe staff contributed to this report.