NEW ORLEANS — When the city of New Orleans announced furloughs for first responders would be ending, Aaron Mischler started hearing from fire firefighters.
“I’ve been getting a lot of calls, asking me if they’re being pranked, if this is real,” said Mischler.
As president of the New Orleans Fire Fighters Association, Mischler says the announcement form city hall Monday was an unexpected surprise.
“It’s really good news to pass on to them saying go to work tomorrow, you’re not being furloughed anymore,” said Mischler.
Citywide furloughs started back in October to deal with revenue shortfalls because of the pandemic. Mischler says those furloughs created public safety concerns and didn’t help morale for fire crews that were already short staffed.
“It was to the point where it seemed like they just didn’t care about us, not the public, but it seemed like the administration really didn’t care about us,” said Mischler.
A house fire on S. Johnson Street in Central City is just one example of public safety being impacted. When the fire happened in mid-November, the nearest fire engine was out of service because of low staffing and furloughs.
Fire crews further away had to respond, resulting in a longer response time. Tragically, one woman was killed, and three homes were destroyed.
Mischler said public safety should never be slowed down.
“We’re going to get the job done, it just takes a little bit longer,” said Mischler.
To cover the financial cost of ending furloughs, city leaders hope stimulus money and successful vaccines will translate into additional revenue.
“As we continue to look at the landscape ahead of us, we feel more comfortable about the options available to us in addition to just more concrete information about the challenges that we are in, that we face and how we are planning to move through them,” said Mayor LaToya Cantrell.
Mischler praises the administration for ending the furloughs and says it’ll go a long way in getting fire crews back to doing what they do best.
“It’s not about our paychecks,” said Mischler. “It’s about an oath that we swore to protect the citizens of the city and we take that to heart and we take that very seriously.”
The ending of furloughs applies to the city’s fire, police, EMS and health departments, as well as the juvenile justice intervention center.
