I Know One Thing That is Very Cheap on Long Island!

When you take a second look at your mortgage, or you LIPA bill, or your auto loan, or your credit card, or your cell phone bill, or your next whatever…thank a Long Island firefighter. If we had to pay our firefighters a mere average salary we’d be deeper in poopoo for sure.

According to Salary.com the average base salary for a firefighter in our nation is over $57,000.00. That means a 20-year veteran would likely make close to $75,000.00. Now, consider the fact that NYC firefighters, when negotiating their salaries work the ‘me too’ argument and debate the issue of paying a NYC firefighter the same as a NYC police officer. This is a conversation for another day; you’ll never get me to agree to that one. But, with this in mind you have to consider the average base salary of a Nassau County village police officer is in excess of some $75,000.00 and their 20-year veterans can pull in as much as $150,000.00 according to recent reports from Newsday.

My point after all this information is that when you crunch the numbers, you have hundreds of thousands of dollars per town if we had to pay our firefighters. We don’t and for that we are very lucky.

Next time Newsday tries to defame firemen as some type of boy’s club of jovial drunkards, remember the last time you called 911 – who came?

Having grown up in Lynbrook for more than 35 years I enjoyed an incredibly professional Police Department, a quick-thinking and quickly responding Fire Department and much more. If I had a problem I walked to the Mayor’s own home and we chewed the fat over his fence; figuratively speaking of course. Now, in Commack we don’t have our own PD, we have a County PD. That being said, when my son started choking some 6 years ago it was one of Suffolk’s finest that came and pretty much saved his life, with the assistance of later responding Commack FD. I will always remember that day, and many other examples.

About a month ago my sister, a volunteer with the Lynbrook Fire Department . I am very proud of her and I am sure those parents will forever remember the quick, professional response of Lynbrook’s bravest on that dreadful day.

Many moons ago, in 1989 I was patrolling S. Jamaica with the NYPD when my partner and I got a call for a baby not breathing. Upon arrival we found a drug-addled baby, lips blue and connected to all kinds of machines trying to detox this poor infant to give her a chance at life. I will never forget the feeling of holding that lifeless body in my hands, or the sound of her crying after our efforts. It was the next day when the EMS Supervisor thought it proper to come to our roll call to inform me that the baby later died; that news and that feeling stay with me to this day.

We have a saying in law enforcement: "You don’t pay a police officer for what he does. You pay him for what he may have to do." Well, we don’t pay our firefighters and yet, just last week Baldwin Fire Department lost a hero to a service-related death.

Take another look at your mortgage, it could be worse.