The city formally asked the Austin Firefighters Association to restart negotiations Nov. 19, and Austin leaders now won't consider or approve a new contract until the union responds.
The setup
Months of labor negotiations this year led to both sides reaching the tentative agreement over a new four-year contract Sept. 26. At that time, City Manager T.C. Broadnax and AFA President Bob Nicks said they were pleased to arrive at a deal to:
- Increase firefighter pay annually, including a larger pay scale adjustment in the first year with higher entry-level wages to help with recruitment
- Implement the "Austin Schedule," reducing weekly work hours under a one-day-on, three-days-off, two-days-on, three-days-off model—making Austin the first large Texas city to use that format
- Allow new hiring and promotional processes
Weeks after the agreement was reached, the AFA announced it was petitioning to get a charter amendment for four-person staffing on the May 2026 election ballot. While council members can pass or amend local ordinances, amendments to the foundational city charter are permanent unless voters approve a change.
The city's current agreement with the AFA expired Sept. 30, days after the tentative new deal was announced. The AFA announced the petition campaign mid-October, while final adoption of the new agreement by both AFA membership and city officials was planned in November. Nicks reported more than 70% of AFA, representing most of AFD's sworn force, had voted to pass the contract as of Nov. 19.
Zooming in
Nicks has said the AFA's push for four-person staffing outside the collective bargaining process was prompted after Austin Fire Department service reductions were discussed this summer during budgeting review.
While no operational changes were made, fire Chief Joel Baker had sought council approval to lower staffing standards to three firefighters per engine in some situations. He said the move was needed given high AFD vacancies due to injury, vacation or illness, and would limit the need for firefighter overtime to fill those gaps.
“It’s important that I stress: I’m not here advocating reducing four-person staffing. What I’m here advocating is, when I don’t have enough people at work, to give me the leeway as the fire chief to staff the engines with three [people]," Baker told council members in late July.
After the AFA's charter campaign kickoff in October, Nicks called the measure necessary to avoid safety risks to firefighters and residents.
Diving in deeper
As the four-year contract was withdrawn from council's Nov. 20 agenda, both AFA and city labor representatives said the other side may have been working in bad faith ahead of a final vote.
“When we negotiated the tentative agreement, the city was under the understanding that we were addressing all outstanding issues and moving forward into a new era of working together and cohesively with the AFA. Obviously with the proposed charter amendment there are outstanding issues, and the city would like the opportunity to explore opportunities to get us all on the same page and achieve labor peace with the AFA," Roxana Stevens, Austin's deputy labor relations officer, told council Nov. 18.
Nicks said Stevens and elected officials were trying to "discredit" firefighters, and that the city should have previously asked the AFA to discuss staffing changes during this year's negotiations. Mayor Kirk Watson said he believed a delay in a final contract vote was needed given the AFA's petition campaign.
“When you have a tentative agreement and then almost immediately are told, ‘Wait, there’s something else that we’re going to do, and we’re going to do it outside the bargaining,’ what I would like to see is us back at the table where we can do that in a collective bargaining agreement," he said. "That is the purpose of that process, it is what we were all doing in good faith. And the council was looking forward to the opportunity to be able to vote on that.”
What else?
Several officials also raised concerns with a key budgeting provision in the AFA petition.
The "Safer Austin" charter amendment centers on staffing but also states that no AFD engines or stations can ever be taken out of service for budget reasons unless the city can prove it's in a "severe financial crisis" limiting public safety and infrastructure services.
"This might be a somewhat extreme reading, but the way it looks to me is that in future years if we’re in a fiscal pinch in the city of Austin, we would have to close every park, every pool, every housing program, every health program before we closed a single fire station for a single day," council member Mike Siegel said. "That would just tie the hands of future city councils, of the community, in a way that I don’t think is fair."
Officials called it an unprecedented proposal, leading to general agreement that council couldn't approve a new contract yet. Referencing a recent political effort to mandate staffing levels at the Austin Police Department, council member Chito Vela said voters already "wisely" rejected a requirement to tie the city's hands.
"This attempt to micromanage the fire department via a charter amendment, it’s just a horrible idea and would create severe economic concerns down the road," he said. "We absolutely need to go back to the bargaining table."
