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Fort Worth prepares to welcome MedStar workforce into fire department, union

Members of IAFF 440 and the city of Fort Worth's management team meet during a collective bargaining session Oct. 9, 2024, at the Local 440 Jim Tate Building.
Camilo Diaz
/
Fort Worth Report
Members of IAFF 440 and the city of Fort Worth's management team meet during a collective bargaining session Oct. 9, 2024, at the Local 440 Jim Tate Building.

Last May, Fort Worth City Council members unanimously approved a plan to dissolve the region’s longtime EMS provider, MedStar. The city opted to switch to a fire-based EMS system, housed within its fire department.

That decision necessitated a lot of behind-the-scenes work to make a fire-based system feasible, including reopening collective bargaining between the city and the union representing its firefighters, IAFF 440. The majority of MedStar employees have been mapped over to equivalent positions with the city, in an effort to retain talent during the merger.

The city and IAFF 440 have been bargaining over the details of that merger since July 2024. They hosted multiple bargaining sessions, where city management sat across the table from the union’s board, and convened privately in several subcommittees dedicated to hashing out the essential details.

Key topics included which incoming MedStar employees should receive civil service protection; what their pay structures should look like; and how to handle questions of accrued vacation time and seniority. Representatives from the city, the union, and MedStar participated.

“We talked a lot about culture,” Assistant City Manager Valerie Washington said in an interview with the Report. “You have this new workforce, and you don’t want to make them feel less than the current workforce (of firefighters). We did everything we could to prevent and mitigate that from happening.”

In a Jan. 14 work session, Washington briefed council members on the progress that has been made up to this point, and presented a draft agreement that the City Council will vote on Jan. 28. The agreement has an estimated cost of $54 million over 15 months, costs that include around 75 new EMT positions on 12-hour shifts and nine new ambulances.

Among the provisions in the agreement are an average 10% salary increase for incoming MedStar EMTs and paramedics; the creation of new EMS job classifications; and civil service representation for both EMTs, paramedics and EMS telecommunicators.

“Our two main driving ideals were to serve the citizens better and then take great care of these people as they come over and become part of our team,” Zac Shaffer, president of IAFF 440, said.

Civil service protections weren’t always guaranteed for telecommunicators. Early in the bargaining process, the city suggested excluding them from the bargaining group and instead classifying them as general employees. The fire union pushed back strongly on the suggestion, and the city’s bargaining team ultimately reconsidered and agreed to civil service classifications for telecommunicators as well.

Shaffer noted that the fire department is the only department whose telecommunicators are currently in the civil service. The Fort Worth police department’s telecommunicators are considered general employees. The police department has had persistent problems with call center staffing, an issue Shaffer attributes in part to a lack of civil service protections.

“We think that the best way to keep those call rooms full, is to make sure that they’re compensated well and they have a right to their job,” Shaffer said.

What is civil service?

In the city of Fort Worth, both police officers and firefighters are sworn civil service positions. In a civil service system, hiring is conducted through examinations, and compensation is determined through a step process. Sworn employees have property rights to their jobs and representation through their department’s union. IAFF 440 represents Fort Worth firefighters. Civil service for police officers and firefighters in Texas is implemented by Chapter 143 of the Texas Local Government Code.

‘Get them on an equal playing field’

Holly Moyer, the city’s assistant human resources director, was part of the city’s shift in mindset with regard to telecommunicators. Before she joined the city of Fort Worth in 2023, she had previous experience working with fire and EMS divisions in central Texas, which gave her an experienced perspective on the issue.

She referenced the wording of local government code Chapter 143, which specifies that a fire department employee whose primary duties are to provide emergency medical services is entitled to civil service protection.

“That is what the telecommunicators are doing,” Moyer said. “They’re on the call, and in that call, they’re providing that service until the EMT and paramedics get to the patient. So that’s just something I think was a factor in that decision-making process.”

Dianna Giordano, the city’s human resources director, said another big part of this process has been communicating the benefits of civil service protection to MedStar employees. MedStar employees have not previously had union representation, and Giordano said there are unique benefits to being civil service employees, including guaranteed step pay increases and exam-based entry and promotional opportunities.

“It removes those individual influences from hiring and promotion so that it’s a very systematic process,” she said. “We’re trying to communicate that as much as possible.”

Shaffer said IAFF 440 has had similar conversations with MedStar employees throughout the bargaining process. MedStar employees were invited to the bargaining sessions, and several sat in on the proceedings throughout the year.

“They don’t really know us, right? They didn’t elect me. They didn’t elect my board,” he said. “And I think it was a foreign concept for them to have somebody negotiate for them that’s not even really part of their organization. But I think the ones that attended the meetings were able to see that we were really putting skin in the game and trying to get them on an equal playing field.”

He’s also had conversations with firefighters about why the merger was necessary. Many firefighters joined the Fort Worth Fire Department because it didn’t run an ambulance service, he said, and worried that dissolving MedStar would change their own jobs.

“They thought this might mean that they’re gonna all of a sudden be riding an ambulance full time,” he said. “And the way that we’re able to take care of the MedStar people as we’re bringing them over, I think guarantees that we will have an available workforce to staff those ambulances.”

‘It’s history in the making’ 

Giordano said she hasn’t seen this kind of merger in many other major cities, and Fort Worth is acting as a trailblazer while it maps the future of its new EMS system.

“It’s a huge task,” she said. “It’s a huge undertaking. It’s history in the making.”

There’s plenty of work left to do after the council approves the agreement. The city’s HR team has tapped a consultant to help work through any friction while merging the cultures of MedStar and the Fort Worth Fire Department, a project that will span throughout the year.

MedStar has served more than a dozen Tarrant County cities and over 1 million residents as the sole EMS provider for 38 years. The city is now ironing out a subscription-based model of service for the other cities that previously relied on MedStar.

“And we don’t have an EMS budget in place for the city of Fort Worth yet,” Washington said. “So we will be going to the mayor and council in the spring to set up the fourth-quarter budget for EMS.”

Shaffer’s team is also hard at work figuring out logistics ahead of the merger, which is expected to take full effect in July. Deployment models, infrastructure and scheduling are top of mind.

“We’ve got about 110 working days between now and July 1,” he said. “And we have our work cut out for us. But you know, it’s getting the team in place and then saying, ‘Hey, listen, here’s what we need, here’s what it will cost, and here’s our timeline for getting it finished and wrapped up and ready to go.’”

This article first appeared on Fort Worth Report and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Emily Wolf is a local government accountability reporter for the Fort Worth Report. She grew up in Round Rock, Texas, and graduated from the University of Missouri-Columbia with a degree in investigative journalism. Reach her at emily.wolf@fortworthreport.org for more stories by Emily Wolf click here.