Former chief fires back at LeBlanc, editor

GALVESTON — For months, Danny Weber has refrained from making public comments about the increasingly nasty battle between the Galveston Fire Department and City Manager Steve LeBlanc.

On Monday, 10 days after announcing his retirement, the former fire chief spoke out, saying LeBlanc and The Daily News editor Heber Taylor misreported the facts of recent claims made against the department.

“I have tried to avoid the sensationalism as much as I can, but it’s become clear to me that there’s only one side being told,” said Weber, whose responding guest column will appear in Wednesday’s edition of The Daily News.

The city and its firefighters have been at odds since this summer when Weber refused to go along with a plan to phase in new firefighters instead of hiring a group of them to meet staffing standards recommended by the State Legislature and the Occupational Health and Safety Administration.

Those recommendations call for four firefighters to man each fire unit responding to a blaze, in what is called a “two in, two out” formation. Two firefighters enter a burning structure, while two others work outside, ready to assist their fellow firefighters if necessary. Most Galveston fire stations only have enough firefighters to staff two or three firefighters per unit.

In a guest column in Sunday’s edition of The Daily News, LeBlanc wrote that failure to enforce its own regulations regarding breaks, overuse of sick time and “ineffective use of manpower” had rendered the fire department inefficient.

Weber, however, said the city manager was employing a smokescreen to hide the fact that Galveston does not have enough firefighters to ensure their own safety.

LeBlanc’s column asserted that hours for sick leave add up to the equivalent of five firefighters a day calling in sick so far this year.

Weber said that LeBlanc arrived at that figure by manipulating the number of sick hours available to firefighters.

Firefighters get 132 sick hours a year, but since they work 24-hour shifts, missing a day to sickness means forfeiting 24 hours of that time.

“The average firefighter uses five or 5 1/2 sick days a year,” Weber said. “That’s not bad, when you figure the bumps and bruises they get doing their jobs.”

Weber also scoffed at Taylor’s Sunday column assertion that private investigators hired by LeBlanc found that firefighters taking care of personal business while on duty sometimes led to them missing 10 emergency calls in one day.

“We had a couple of guys who went home for lunch and stayed too long, and they were disciplined,” Weber said. “They missed no emergency runs and finished their regular duties for the day, but were still doing something they shouldn’t have, and it was handled.

“Steve LeBlanc says we didn’t take any serious action? The discipline had to equate to the offense. A big misconception is that these private investigators found any major offenses. The report and video given to me by them did not show anything like that. It showed a couple of guys taking too long for lunch.”

Weber said Galveston’s fire department was efficient by any reasonable standard. “You judge efficiency by the end product. These guys are fighting fires, saving lives, and you can’t put a number on human lives. You can measure property damage that was prevented by a fast response, and these guys have response times that are as good as anyone’s,” Weber said.

Weber said the mending of the relationship between the fire department and city hall would probably require a change in administrative leadership.

“At some point, there’s going to have to be a healing,” he said. “At this point, it’s not going to happen, and I’m afraid it’s probably going to take some intervention by city council.”