St. Louis CofCC Blog

Mayor Slay:

Over past decade or so, race relations at the City’s Fire Department have sometimes been heated. Some of the bad feelings have to do with historic grievances about the management of the Department under former chiefs; others are newer complaints having to do with some pending promotions to supervisory positions.

Whatever the reasons, it is well past time for things to change. Firefighting is too dangerous – and too important – for the Department’s firehouses to be divided against themselves.

In next year’s budget I will seek funding to help underwrite the expense of mandatory training in diversity issues and race relations for all St. Louis firefighters. And the City will ask FIRE and Local 73, the two firefighter organizations that represent most members of the fire service, to develop a plan together that will spell out concrete measures to improve relations between the two groups, and race relations within the Department.

I will have more to say about the pending promotions next week.

I think the third and fourth paragraphs are related.  I think Slay’s call for “diversity training” (doesn’t it exist already in the SLFD?) is a trade-off to the FIRE extremists and the Sherman George affirmative action quislings in order to push the “controversial” promotions to Captain on through.

For Mayor Slay to say that there some be some sort of “diversity training” in juxtaposition with his desire for the FD to make these promotions based on (what Slay acknowledges is) fair testing based on competency, is for him to concede the point philosophically speaking that promoting white firemen is somehow a tainted concept or a suspect action that must be “atoned” for somehow.  In that, Slay is exposing himself to be almost as bad an affirmative action junkie those whom he is pressuring to make the promotions.