Chicago News Cooperative | The Bottom Line: As Recession-Pinched Cities Trim Their Fire Department Staffing, Chicago Stands Pat

The number of fires that the department was called to put out also dropped dramatically in recent decades. What has hardly changed is the staffing level of the Chicago Fire Department, even as mayors from New York to Los Angeles are trying to combat the recession with reductions in fire-protection spending.

A Chicago News Cooperative survey of the country’s 10 largest cities found that Chicago ranks near the top in the resources devoted to its fire department. With one firefighter for every 637 residents, Chicago has more firefighters per capita than every other large United States city except Houston, the C.N.C.’s analysis found.

And, taking into account its coverage area of about 230 square miles and more than 90 firehouses, Chicago’s department ranked third among the 10 largest cities in the density of firehouses, behind only New York and Philadelphia.

Rahm Emanuel has quietly visited many of Chicago’s firehouses since winning the February election to succeed Mayor Richard M. Daley. But Mr. Emanuel’s campaign platform for dealing with the city’s perennial budget deficits made no mention of any proposals that would affect staffing in the fire department.

Asked this week to specify Mr. Emanuel’s position on fire department staff levels, a spokeswoman, Chris Mather, issued a one-sentence statement: “We have serious fiscal issues ahead of us, but we also understand how critical the dedicated firefighters in Chicago are to ensuring the safety of our city.”

Daley administration officials have rejected suggestions from the city’s inspector general that the department reduce staffing from five firefighters to four in each crew, as is the norm in most other cities.

“The decline in fire deaths and fires over the years is not reason to think about cutting back the number of firefighters or firehouses,” the fire department spokesman, Larry Langford, said in a statement this week.

Still, with the city’s budget deficits exceeding $500 million every year, some fiscal experts questioned whether Mr. Emanuel could afford to avoid the politically touchy issue of fire department staffing.

Police and fire costs are to the city budget as defense spending is to the federal budget, not only in the sense that police and fire forces provide core public safety functions, but also because they make up a huge chunk of the payroll. Of the city’s almost 33,000 full-time workers, roughly two-thirds are police or fire department employees. The city allocated almost $2 billion in its $6.15 billion spending plan for 2011 to public safety.

“Firefighters and other public safety personnel will have to be included in the efficiencies and possible reductions,” said Laurence Msall, president of the Civic Federation, a local budget watchdog group that is financed largely by business interests.

“We recognize the political sensitivity, but staffing for public safety must match the actual needs rather than relying on traditional levels of staffing,” Mr. Msall added.

Financial pressures have led to a decrease in the number of police officers (a trend that Mr. Emanuel has vowed to reverse), but the fire department has the same number of budgeted positions in Mr. Daley’s 2011 budget as it did last year.

There are almost 5,200 employees in the fire department, including about 4,300 firefighters, according to city budget documents. In the last five years, the budget of the fire department has grown more than 12 percent, to $509.4 million this year.

Officials of Chicago’s firefighters’ union did not return calls for this article. The union, which led a 23-day strike in 1980, had endorsed Gery Chico to succeed Mr. Daley as mayor.

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