I am a former lieutenant/EMT with the Vicksburg Fire Department. Regarding the recent controversy surrounding the fire department “overtime issues,” I feel the continuing attacks by Mayor Flaggs against the VFD are clearly personal and counterproductive to his duty as mayor.

He did not just cross the line. He tripped over the edge. Make no mistake: This is about a mayor who did not get his “picks” for certain appointed positions within the VFD. He has ranted about it in the local media for the last 2.5 years. And now we are witnessing a person whose bruised ego is more important than making sound business decisions and trying to work toward progress, instead he’s working away from it.

Here are some facts that the public needs to know and the Mayor needs to ponder.

1. Overall, the VFD came in just a little over budget in the last fiscal year. Does that warrant this kind of scrutiny? Absolutely not!

2. There are much bigger issues — jobs, health care, housing, crime, drugs, etc. Flaggs may be working on these things, but is there no room for improvement in these areas?

3. The Fire Department is extremely under-staffed and must maintain a minimum manpower as set forth by the state rating bureau. He knows this but continues to send them into battle with a butter knife. Fix this and fix the “overtime problem.”

4. Starting salary for a firefighter $8.70 per hour. If you look at just the hourly rate alone on a yearly scale a family of 4 is only $1,000 over the federal poverty guidelines. Factor in their scheduled overtime, they would come in at only $2,000 over. Have a family of 5 and that puts you in poverty, overtime included.

5. You can’t get people to hire on much less get people to stay for $8.70 per hour, especially when other departments are paying much more. If you do want to decrease the amount of “un-scheduled” overtime, then common sense tells you that one way to do that is to bump up the starting pay in an effort to attract more talent and better talent, and keep them.

6. The VFD is still on a 2008 model pay scale. Starting salary around 1995 was $7.11 per hour. In 2008, it went to $8.7 per hour. This comes to only a $1.59 per hour base increase over a period of 20 years. Disgusting. Paramedics start at $11.04 per hour. I can go work for AMR as an EMT-Basic and make more than that! These are skilled professionals we are talking about here, not cashiers. These folks are highly trained, educated and knowledgeable in the area they work in.

My daughter has an non-skilled labor position in Vicksburg and makes $10 per hour.  It is sickening that this kind of discrepancy exists and applies to people that are not only skilled, but people that literally put their life on the line every day they punch that clock.

7. The minimum wage gap for VFD starting firefighter is leveling off. At the time, $7.11 per hour was 67 percent more than minimum wage. $8.70 per hour is only 20 percent over minimum wage and it will most likely increase to $10.10 and hour soon. So in a sense you can say that as minimum wage continues to rise with no adjustments to maintain the gap that was once there, these firefighters are actually losing money.

8. Firefighters do not get a cost of living raise! In fact, they are the only city employees besides police who do not get a cost of living raise. That’s totally unacceptable. Let me also point out that there has never been a shortage of regular pay raises for city officials. You will see this in the media however as they seem proud to achieve such a strata of society while keeping firefighters pay below that of pond scum.

9. City Hall has been cutting the fire department budget gradually over the last several years. So they have less to work with while trying to maintain adequate protection for the city. But they have cut so much that “minimum manpower” is not at the state rating bureau standards. This means if they were audited today, they would lose their current fire rating. Which, in turn will raise both commercial and home insurance rates.

I hope the public finds this information useful in their overall assessment of how Mayor Flaggs handled this situation. Flaggs needs to ice down the bruised ego of his and stop acting like a child, address the issues described above, or step down.

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Brian Pugh is a Vicksburg resident and was a firefighter with the Vicksburg Fire Department from 1998 to 2006.