Rethinking budget cuts can put fire chiefs at an advantage.
How goals are articulated often determines whether or not they will be realized. Nowhere is this more true than in creating and negotiating budgets.
Budgeting might seem like a simple matter of matching resources to needs, but it is never that clear. The budget process is really a rhetorical chess match that requires anticipation, planning and a strong endgame. This might not have seemed to be the case in years when municipal governments were flush, but with property values declining and payroll and sales taxes decreasing, the stakes are up.
The golden rule for budget negotiations is never make an across-the-board cut. In other words, if asked to trim 10% off last year's budget or cut 10% from a proposed budget, don't agree to take 10% out of each budgeted item. Instead, select a service or a capital improvement that represents 10% of the total budget and cut that.
The obvious problem with an across-the-board cut is that it lowers the quality of everything that is dependent on the budget. The strategic impact is even worse, agreeing to make cuts across the board eliminates the potential for a strategic response. An administrator who accepts these terms is boxed out of the dialogue over what to cut and what to keep.
If that administrator represents a fire department, there is even more to lose. Consider what happens if every department has to lose 10% across the board. Police, fire, public works, and streets and sanitation agencies all tighten their belts and do the best they can with what is left. But if the budget debate focuses on budget items and not percentages, then police and fire departments have a distinct advantage because they address ongoing community needs, and cutting back on their services could be a matter of life and death.
Consider a typical corporate office. A director of internal communication reports to the CEO in much the same way a public-information officer reports to the chief. The director is responsible for running corporate communication meetings, handling layoffs and acquisitions and divestiture announcements, and putting out a letter to employees from the CEO. None of these responsibilities impact the bottom line, so internal communication is particularly vulnerable when budget managers start trimming the fat.
What happens if the internal communication budget is $200,000, and a 10% cut is made by taking 10% out of every internal communication budget item? Nothing. There will be no appreciable difference. But what if the letter from the CEO to the employees is a $20,000 budget item, and the letter gets cut and the rest of the budget remains intact? Probably the cut passes through budget meetings, and nothing is said until the CEO wants to put out his next letter to employees, and then the $20,000 gets put back into the budget.
Of course, most budget negotiations aren't this simple. That is why managing a budget requires anticipation, planning and endgame maneuvering.
As a preliminary step, budgets have to be organized around services. For instance, rather than having a computer budget, build computer costs into each of the services within the departments that use computers. Instead of asking for $10,000 for new computers, budget 10 $1,000 computers into 10 budget requests from 10 different services within the department.
This is more challenging with some budget items. Training, for instance, can't be a budget item because it is not a service, so it has to be divided over the services that benefit from and require training. Then when the budget cut is requested, select an entire service, say water rescue. When the service is cut, one computer and the water-rescue training that it required go with it.
Next, it is worthwhile to anticipate a range and even a series of budget cuts. Research what is happening to other departments. Consider the municipality's history of belt-tightening. Also, assess what seem to be the priorities in the community. Then answer the essential question: How deep can this go? That is the target. The depth of the cuts may extend to taking companies out of service, layoffs, hiring and purchasing freezes, brown outs, or station closings.
Now write the budget. Write the bare-minimum budget that protects the most-needed services even in a worst-case economic scenario. Add in the next-most-needed services, and then throw in the wish list. When the cuts are requested, start with the wish list and work toward the most-needed services kicking and screaming every inch of the way. As a general rule, the larger the budget request, the more will be left when budget negotiations are finished. If it is possible to make a case for a budget increase, make it. Since the lion's share of career department budgets are personnel costs, it probably always will include a request for new hires or wage or benefits increases. Volunteer and combination departments will need to be more creative.
The longer the list of budget items, the more pieces a chief has to play with in endgame negotiations. If budget negotiations get this far, fire chiefs have a decided advantage. Some budget items will be preserved because the services are not optional. Others may be off the table because even talking about cutting them would create political problems for elected officials. Some may be protected because of union influence. Just breaking the budget down into services will have provided tacit protection for a large group of expenditures that might otherwise have been in contention.
Remember, the path of least resistance for accountants and politicians is to keep the discussion abstract. Be ready for the argument that a percentage could be cut out of a service or of all services. The response should be that the services are stripped back already and to cut them further would diminish their quality. Then offer to eliminate an entire service that equals the needed amount.
This may seem manipulative, but asking for an across-the-board cut also is manipulative. Across-the-board cuts allow decision-makers to side-step their leadership responsibilities. Some services are more valuable than others, and forcing a budget debate from the abstract to the concrete only improves the quality of the outcome. The community would benefit if every department handled budgeting like this.
One tactic should be avoided. An emotional context envelopes all things involving fire protection, and there is no need to emphasize it. The value of some services is so apparent that dramatizing it is manipulative and offensive. Hopefully anyone who has stepped into harm's way to help another understands that it cheapens the dignity of the act to tout it. Just as there is a rhetoric of budget negations, there is a sacred rhetoric of human values, and it is best implied and not overstated by accusing city council members of having blood on their hands because they didn't fund a firefighter position. The best arguments in favor of funding fire department services are made with dignity and restraint. The powerful incentives for funding life-saving services are inseparable from their names.
Converting the budget into a list of services with costs attached may not look very efficient from an accounting perspective, but that is the point. Don't think of fire departments in terms of numbers; discuss them in language that expresses compassion and quality of life. By converting budgets from dollars to units of service, a fire department forces budget negotiations away from impersonal numbers and onto the inherently value-laden discourse of the human struggle.
Throughout his 30-year career, Thomas Roach has worked with media issues in the political, business and academic arenas. He has an associate's degree from Joliet Junior College, a bachelor's degree in journalism and a master's degree in English, both from Northern Illinois University, and a Ph.D. in communication studies from Northwestern University. His dissertation on the American news media received the national Dissertation of the Year Award from the Speech Communication Association in 1994. Roach is a tenured associate professor in communication at Purdue University Calumet.
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