A new labor contract that would give the city’s firefighters higher pay and more time between shifts was supposed to have been approved by City Council two weeks ago. Now, it looks like the city and the firefighters have more negotiating to do.
Council canceled the vote on the $63 million contract on Nov. 20, after worries surfaced about the financial implications of a proposition that the Austin Firefighters Association is working to get placed on an upcoming election ballot.
The AFA’s proposition, if it makes it onto the ballot and is approved by voters, will amend the city’s charter to require that a minimum of four firefighters be assigned to every fire truck sent to an emergency. It would also require that “no Austin Fire Department emergency apparatus or fire station in working order shall be closed, shut down, or taken out of service for budgetary reasons,” unless the city is able to demonstrate proof of a “severe financial crisis that impairs its ability to meet its obligation to provide essential police, fire, emergency medical, and infrastructure services.”
The first part of the AFA’s charter amendment – the four-person staffing requirement – is extremely important to the firefighters and is already part of city law. However, Council members have the power to amend that law and considered doing so during the summer’s budget negotiations. With the defeat of Prop Q, which had included $8.3 million for the fire department to help maintain four-person staffing, it’s reasonable to assume Council would again consider reducing the staffing requirement. But if the AFA’s charter amendment becomes law, Council won’t have the power to make that change. Only the city’s residents would be able to amend the charter.
The AFA began collecting signatures in October to put the charter amendment before voters, shortly after tentatively agreeing to the new four-year contract. Deputy Labor Relations Officer Roxana Stevens, who helped negotiate the contract, recommended to Council at a Nov. 18 meeting that the city ask the AFA to reopen the collective bargaining negotiations to address the concerns over staffing and the closing of fire stations, which firefighters refer to as “brownouts.” “We believe that they should have brought [those concerns] to the bargaining table as an outstanding issue, but they didn’t and instead bypassed the collective bargaining process,” Stevens said.
Council agreed to postpone a vote on the contract, with several members pointing out that the approval of AFA’s charter amendment would make it harder to reduce spending in what is expected to be several years of budget deficits. CM Chito Vela compared the AFA’s proposal to a ballot proposition rejected by voters in 2021 that would have forced the city to hire hundreds of new police officers, calling it a “horrible idea.” CM Krista Laine asked Stevens if the language of the charter amendment would force Council to watch the city go into financial crisis before it could revise the four-person staffing model or close fire stations. “That’s exactly what it says,” Stevens replied.
In a post to X, AFA President Bob Nicks emphasized that it is the city that is contemplating a change to the status quo and that it was on their negotiators to have made those desires known during the collective bargaining process. “THEY should have asked the firefighters to discuss this during bargaining if they were seeking a change and they did NOT,” he wrote.
In remarks to the Chronicle, Nicks called the Nov. 18 exchange between Stevens and Council a “dog and pony show” and lamented what he described as a “growing trend to discredit firefighters’ integrity and honesty in front of the public.” He added that the rules of collective bargaining forbid the city from making a change to a labor contract without first negotiating it. “Yet they did,” Nicks said. “They tried to change brownouts, and they have changed staffing. They just approved a budget that takes away $8.3 million from the fire department, which will come out of our staffing. So the only entity of the two parties that violated the concept of good faith bargaining is the city.”
Nicks said it was possible the AFA would return to the bargaining table in an effort to save the increased downtime between shifts that was included in the tentative agreement and would improve the firefighters’ mental health. “The mental health of my members is extremely important,” he said. “And if there’s a way we can salvage that, then we’re willing. But we’re not willing to go back to the table and not include the items in the petition, which is four-person staffing and the brownouts of stations.”
This article appears in December 5 • 2025.
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