About 50 Bangor firefighters filled the council chambers during a Monday night meeting lobbying for the council to use federal COVID-19 relief for premium pay.
The Bangor firefighters union, Local 772 of the International Association of Firefighters, requested more than $817,000 to provide bonuses to first responders, but it ranked 51st out of 60 requests made for the city’s $20.8 million in American Rescue Plan Act funding after a review done by a volunteer panel.
The burgeoning dispute between firefighters and city officials is a side effect of the process that has governed Bangor’s use of the federal money. It developed slower than other Maine cities and towns, with much of the work in vetting applications outsourced to an outside group.
The union argues that money, which would roughly equal two $3,000 payments for each employee, would help attract new employees and retain existing ones until next spring when bargaining for a new contract begins, Jared Willey, a Bangor firefighter and president of Local 772 of the International Association of Firefighters, said.
“Even prior to the pandemic, our firefighters were already burdened with compounding stressors such as physical exhaustion, heightened cancer risks, and the enduring toll on their mental health, including emotional and mental burnout,” Willey said.
Some 34 fire department employees left during or shortly after the COVID-19 pandemic and the department is facing a roughly 12 percent employee deficit, Willey said. More than a dozen firefighters and paramedics spoke Monday night about helping people sick with COVID-19, living away from their families during the pandemic to minimize the risk of getting them sick, and burnout.
“What I remember most about the pandemic was thinking ‘I hope I can get COVID, that way I can have two weeks off,’” Andrew Rioux, a firefighter since 2019, said. “Members of the city council, this is what burnout is, and the fire service and EMS have been burned out for years.”
While they were waiting for the meeting to begin, firefighters performed an elevator rescue when the small elevator in city hall stopped working, Willey said.
The union is one of 60 parties asking for some of the more than $16 million in pandemic relief funding the city has left to give. City councilors are first considering 25 of the 60 applications the city received that a volunteer review panel gave the highest scores to.
The Heart of Maine United Way oversaw 45 volunteers who evaluated applications for funding and made recommendations to the council. The review panel gave the applications a score based on criteria the Bangor councilors set.
Those first 25 applications are being considered in weekly workshops based on their “area of emphasis,” or what issue the proposals aim to combat, such as homelessness or substance use. Together, the top 25 proposals ask for more than $21.4 million.
The review panel critiqued the request by asking about how one-time pay would recruit and motivate first responders, according to the United Way’s report. Members also didn’t understand how the money would be allocated. Despite those questions, the panel recommended the city fill the union’s request.
The councilors previously stressed that this plan for how to consider the highest scoring applications does not mean the city will automatically give the requested amount of funding to the 25 top-ranked applicants.
Paying essential workers is one of the few things pandemic relief funding can be used for, according to federal rules. Portland firefighters received a $1,000 bonus in the city’s first ARPA tranche and $2,500 in the second, a city spokesperson Jessica Grondin said in April.
Bangor firefighters received an additional $2 per hour from April 26, 2020 to July 11, 2020, which amounted to an additional $400 for each employee, Willey said.