We’re Purposely ‘Elevating’ Response Times, FDNY Commissioner Says
By Joe Maniscalco
Outgoing FDNY Commissioner Robert Tucker on Thursday downplayed the significance of increasing emergency response times across New York City saying that his department is purposely “elevating” the alarming figures.
“We're managing response time now because of the limited resources that we have, and so we're purposely delaying certain calls, elevating our response times to try to affect patient outcomes for sicker people who need ambulances faster,” Tucker told a joint New York City Council hearing on Nov. 13. “There is a limited amount of resources that we have, and we can do a lot better.”
Tucker, who previously headed a private security firm called T&M Protection Resources and has zero prior experience working for the FDNY, further told Council Members considering a bill to separate Emergency Medical Services [EMS] from the FDNY that it’s “a little bit fabricated to use response times as the metric of measurement.”
“If we have a boo-boo in Central Park and a cardiac arrest on 57th Street and Fifth, we're going to hold the boo-boo call, and we're going to raise the average response times as a result of that in order to get a fast response to the cardiac arrest on 57th Street,” he added.
It now takes more than 11 minutes on average for help to arrive New Yorkers in trouble, and the outlook for those suffering heart attacks are especially grim.
The annual Mayor’s Management Report [MMR] for fiscal year 2024 found that just 20 percent of cardiac arrest patients were revived. This year’s MMR found that statistic had slipped even further down to just 17 percent.
Intro. 521 is seeking to reverse the 1996 merger of EMS with the FDNY done during former Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s first time in office. Giuliani, who famously went on to become Donald Trump’s personal mouthpiece and recently received a presidential pardon for his efforts to undermine the results of the 2020 election, had predicated the need for the now 30-year-old EMS/FDNY merger on poor response times.
This week, however, Tucker warned against “forcing a divorce of Fire and EMS services” insisting that such a move would be a “disaster for response times.”
“Response times are a metric that I'm very focused on, and we are monitoring it, literally second by second,” Tucker said. “But as I said before, response time is something that we're managing—and we manage it up. So these numbers in the MMR are up, but we manage it up because what we're doing every day is a logistical business where we're trying to decide where to put the resources that we have.”
The FDNY EMS budget represents just 16 percent of the Fire Department’s overall $2.6 billion budget. Today, there are reportedly just 354 FDNY EMS ambulances in service compared to 417 a year ago.
Intro. 521 proponents insist the failure to properly acknowledge EMS as a uniformed service has contributed to the massive pay disparity between EMS and other first responder services, ultimately leading to the profound recruitment and retention issues EMS continues to endure.
“These are working people doing some of the hardest, most dangerous and most emotional work in city government, and they've been treated like second-class public servants for decades,” Intro. 521 sponsor Justin Brannan [D-47th District] said on Thursday. “Despite all that, they earn far less than firefighters or police officers, even though they face the same risks and carry the same sense of duty.”
The base salary for an EMS EMT after 5-and-half years on the job is roughly $59,000. By comparison, the annual base salary for Sanitation workers—is more than $95,000.
Outgoing Mayor Eric Adams is leaving office having spectacularly failed to achieve the pay parity he promised EMS workers before being sworn in four years ago. “For years, our EMTs, paramedics & fire inspectors have been shamefully denied pay parity, that comes to an end when I become Mayor,” Hizzoner said in a June 4, 2021 Tweet.
“Many EMS workers, a majority of whom are women and people of color, are working two or even three jobs just to pay the bills and make ends meet,” Council Member Brannan continued on Thursday. “They love what they do, but love doesn't pay their rent. They shouldn't have to choose between saving lives and supporting their families right now.”
EMS crews have been working without a contact since June 2022.
“What my breaking point is or would be, I don't want to see,” EMS veteran Jennifer Aguiluz told Work-Bites in 2023. “I am afraid of what that would look like.”
Last year, District Judge Analisa Torres certified a class action lawsuit brought by two dozen FDNY EMS workers alleging pay discrimination based on gender and ethnicity. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission [EEOC] had also previously supported the litigation as well.
“The feds agreed with us that there is pay discrimination when it comes to EMS and Fire Inspectors,” FDNY EMS Local 2507 President Oren Barzilay previously told Work-Bites. “We represent the highest diversity group of people—that’s why we are paid the lowest.”
Tucker—who handed in his resignation the day after Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani won the race to succeed Mayor Eric Adams—said pay parity is just one factor in a “multi-pronged approach to solving this crisis.” He further argued that that making EMS a standalone department would duplicate existing structures and be too costly.
“What my members get paid is, unfortunately, not our responsibility,” the outgoing FDNY head told City Council members.