Twenty-one years ago, arbitrator Howard Foster urged the city and its firefighters’ union to consider the use of part-time firefighters to help with staffing and city finances.

“We urge the parties to thoroughly explore the possibility of allocating resources to part-time firefighters in their upcoming negotiations and particularly urge the union not to dismiss the prospect summarily,” arbitrator Howard Foster wrote in his 2022 impact arbitration award between Jamestown and the union representing city firefighters.

Countless negotiations have come and gone, and part-time firefighters have yet to be used in Jamestown to help alleviate countless scheduling issues that could make firefighters’ lives easier on a day-to-day basis. Foster’s words, in our opinion, were a request for the city and its firefighters to abandon all-or-nothing tactics that too often led to arbitrators having to come in and decide issues that should be able to be decided locally. For two decades our discourse regarding fire department staffing has been to propose adding 12 to 16 firefighters a year and the city refusing.

The only change between 2002 and now is the federal government is offering to prop up a system the city can’t afford. The question is how long the federal government can afford to do so or has the desire to do so.

Like most discussions between the city and its firefighters over the past two decades the proposal to hire eight additional firefighters with a three-year, $1.8 million federal SAFER grant has taken on that all-too-familiar all-or-nothing tone in the community, among the City Council members and mayor it elected and its firefighters.

It’s the wrong tone and approach.

The fate of the SAFER grant at tonight’s council meeting is up in the air. If the grant is turned away, we’d like to see a new tenor brought to an old problem — how to appropriately staff the Jamestown Fire Department in a way that the city can afford. Too often those discussions have resulted in all-or-nothing ultimatums which results in the position where we find ourselves today ­– not enough firefighters to do more and more work.

Making changes to the department will require creativity and flexibility on the part of both the city’s elected officials and the union representing the firefighters. What does the Jamestown Fire Department need to look like in 2023? What are the department’s primary duties and what is the staffing needed to fulfill those duties? Are there out-of-the-box solutions that can increase manpower at peak times — both for fires and ambulance duties — without straining the city budget?

Can the city make use of volunteers in some capacity, including paying them on an as-needed basis when they respond inside the city for ambulance or rescue calls? Volunteer departments in Warren County, Pa., are paying the city fire department to respond outside the city limits. Can the reverse work here under our existing mutual aid system? Does the city actually need fewer firefighters and more EMTs to run the ambulance but not respond to fires? Are paid part-time firefighters something that could increase staffing during peak hours while not straining the budget?

There are bound to be good ideas. There are ideas that won’t work. All would have to be bargained — and that means both sides abandoning their past all-or-nothing positions. If they don’t, we’ll find ourselves in the same position in 2043 as we are in 2023 — talking about how to staff a fire department that is responding table or we will be in this same position in 2043. It’s time to break the cycle.

It is the job of the City Council to present thought-provoking solutions to the city’s issues. Those ideas should include outside-the-box options that spark conversation among each other as well as the Jamestown Fire Department. Both entities need to come together to potentially use any money that might be available for appropriate solutions. The “all-or-none” approach just won’t work. Just ask the private sector, who does all of the above not for grant money, but for survival.