City of Austin FY09-10 Budget
Steve Stewart, ATCEMSEA—September 17th, 2009
The City Budget is about to be approved. The positives for our members is that we were able to get service incentive pay back and there will be no furloughs. We also got all seven paramedic positions that had been “frozen” thawed and we will be able to hire those positions. Also the ten “ACC” cadet positions were thawed plus we have added five new positions for a total of 15 with a new District Command position to oversee and act as a mentor for the program. The goal of this program is to help to maintain and increase the diversity of our workforce.
We also pushed to add a peak load unit to the budget.
The city manager and four of the council members did not place a high enough priority on this to make it happen. Three of the council members placed an additional peak load ambulance as their top priority. We will not be staffing the new station to serve Avery Ranch, just like we did not staff the new station at Spicewood Springs (although AFD has been budgeted and is staffing both.) It seems as though we are becoming more and more a system status EMS system. Which makes it difficult to be a system that paramedics can retire from.