April 3, 2008
A summary of daily news relevant to the federal workforce produced by the Partnership for
Public Service.
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Senators Grill Forest Service on Attrition Rates Among Its Southern California Firefighters
The Press-Enterprise
By Ben
Goad
The U.S. Forest Service will be fully staffed this Southern California fire season despite the exodus of scores of agency firefighters, the
nation's top forest official said Tuesday.
But lawmakers at Tuesday's hearing on the Forest Service's budget said they remain troubled by the high attrition rate of first-year firefighters,
and one agency critic said the problem is far worse than officials admit.
Agriculture Department Undersecretary Mark Rey acknowledged that the agency has a problem retaining personnel in the region, particularly as
entry-level firefighters leave in droves to take better-paying jobs with municipal fire departments or with Cal Fire, the state's firefighting
entity.
Concerns about Forest Service firefighter attrition rates in Southern California come as officials predict a severe fire season.
Nearly half of the Forest Service's first-year firefighters in Southern California -- 46.6 percent -- left the agency's employ in 2007.
The national attrition rate is 26.6 percent, according to a Forest Service report presented to lawmakers at a hearing Tuesday before the Senate
Appropriations Committee's Agriculture Subcommittee.
The San Bernardino National Forest and adjacent Angeles National Forest -- two of the nation's most fire-threatened forests -- had the
most resignations of any of California's 18 forests last year, according the Forest Service report.
Rey announced that the agency is working on a plan to reverse the Southern California trend. But he also said that recruitment levels nationally
are sufficient to fill the vacancies created by departing firefighters.
"These positions have to be filled, and the pay scales have to be comparable," Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said as she left the hearing.
Under sharp questioning from Feinstein, the subcommittee's chairwoman, Rey vowed that the agency would indeed fill the positions funded for the
region in the federal budget.
But Casey Judd, business manager for the Federal Wildland Fire Service Association, a firefighter employee group, said he doubts Rey will be able
to keep his word.
"For him to promise that they could staff at the funded level is just irresponsible," said Judd, who attended the hearing but did not testify.
Statewide, there are currently 3,033 permanent firefighter positions, said John Heil, a California-based Forest Service spokesman. Of those, 312
are now vacant. Additionally, the agency projects that it will hire roughly 1,380 seasonal firefighters this year, Heil said. The hiring process is
under way, he said.
Departure Motives Disputed
According to the report, 44 percent of the Southern California firefighters who left Forest Service jobs last year did so to take a job with Cal
Fire or a local department. However, among those who left the San Bernardino and Angeles national forests, the portion was 61 percent, the report
shows.
Rey lamented that the federal government had paid for extensive training for those departing firefighters, but he maintained that many state and
local firefighters were, at the same time, joining the Forest Service.
He said the agency doesn't know exactly how much it spends on training, but new hires must complete 160 hours of training before they are allowed
to fight fires.
Pay and Benefits Differ
He said Forest Service hourly pay rates are higher than those on the state level. But the agency's report concedes that Cal Fire firefighters
receive a more generous retirement plan and that they work more hours so their annual pay is higher.
While the Forest Service pays a rank-and-file firefighter an average of $17.85 an hour, an equivalent Cal Fire employee receives an average of
$15.04, according to the report. But over the course of a year, that federal firefighter earns $56,096, but the state firefighter gets $64,760
because Cal Fire employees can work more hours.
Firefighters who are single and have no children -- those willing to spend days at a time away from home and to work longer hours for more money
-- may prefer the state pay scale, Rey said.
But those looking for more structured work schedules, and those who prefer the Forest's Service's primary function, protecting the wilderness,
will remain with that agency, he said.
Rey noted that, apart from the entry-level position, Southern California's attrition rate is basically on par with national averages. He said the
agency is working on a retention plan that would be completed in the coming weeks.
Judd called Rey's remarks the "typical smoke and mirrors of this agency" and said the retention issue is far more serious than Rey and Forest
Chief Abigail Kimbell, who testified alongside him, suggested.
He said many of those leaving the department are experienced, veteran firefighters. Some are even agreeing to take demotions, and yet they still
receive better pay at the state and local departments.
Additionally, he said, the firefighters' reasons for leaving go beyond pay. Firefighters question whether the Forest Service even recognizes that
retention is a problem, he said.
"They've lost the sense that the agency gives a damn about them," said Judd who has pushed for higher pay for firefighters.
New Rule Threatens Jobs
Adding to the Forest Service's woes are new standards that require firefighters to take college courses rather than on-the-job or in-house
training to keep their standing.
The federal Office of Personnel Management is currently weighing the new standards.
"I think what's happening is very, very wrong, unfair and unneeded," said Sen. Pete Domenici, who raised the issue. "I cannot believe that we're
going to lose experienced managers and experienced firefighters because old OPM says they have to have a certain kind of college degree."
Domenici, R-N.M., questioned Kimbell about the impact of the new requirements on the Forest Service.
"I think it's a very serious problem," Kimbell testified, adding that the agency has put together a task force to look at the potential loss of
firefighters who could be deemed unqualified if the rule is implemented.
Officials from the Office of Personnel Management did not answer a request Tuesday afternoon for information about the new standard, which were
lambasted by lawmakers at the hearing.
"When you're out on a wildland fire, I'll opt for experience every day before I'll opt for a college degree," said Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho. "The
fires we fight today cannot be diagramed in a textbook."
Rey said that 300 Forest Service firefighters and an additional 500 firefighters who work for Interior Department agencies could be affected.
That threat and the Forest Service's retention problem come as officials are predicting a severe fire season across the United States and
particularly in Southern California.
Computer Modernization is Making Pension Payments EZ
The Washington
PostBy Stephen Barr
RetireEZ seems to be living up to its name, based on early returns.
The computer system, which began operating in February, is allowing the Office of Personnel Management to pay full pension benefits on time,
instead of only partial benefits to new retirees, the office said yesterday.
The OPM said it compared 34 pensions awarded by the new computer system with those based on paper records and concluded that the technology
upgrade provided the right amount within 30 days of an employee's retirement.
"We are pleased to report the majority of cases that processed to date under RetireEZ matched the legacy calculation," Linda M. Springer, the OPM
director, said in a statement.
Springer is scheduled to appear today before the House Appropriations financial services subcommittee, chaired by Rep. Jose E. Serrano (D-N.Y.).
The computer modernization project will likely be among the topics discussed because congressional auditors have raised questions about its cost and
performance.
The OPM said yesterday that it had reviewed the project's costs and determined that a previous estimate included several million dollars of
spending before fiscal 2006 that was not related to the modernization.
A revised estimate, the OPM said, shows that $106.5 million has been spent on planning and acquisition and that an additional $254 million will be
spent on operations and maintenance through 2016.
For years, the OPM has provided new retirees with interim pension payments as it tried to pull together paper records and reconstruct employment
histories. The hunt for personnel files often took months, forcing retirees to wait for correctly calculated pension checks, usually for larger
amounts.
The OPM's workload picked up as an increasing number of federal employees, mostly baby boomers, filed claims. The OPM administers retirement
systems for about 3 million government workers and 2.5 million government retirees and their survivors.
The paper-based administrative process "was doomed to deteriorate with the onset of the pending retirement wave," the OPM said yesterday in a
progress report on the modernization project.
The automated system can make up to 150 distinct calculations when figuring out the correct annuity for a new retiree, the OPM said.
The first phase of the project involves about 26,000 employees paid through a General Services Administration payroll processing center.
Subsequent phases will cover the rest of the executive branch, the Postal Service, and the legislative and judicial branches.
In response to concerns raised by the Government Accountability Office, the OPM said it added personnel to conduct tests on the new computer
system, find defects and fix them. A contractor also will verify that system components are functioning.
As more records are converted to the new system and the volume of claims grows, "we expect to encounter additional
challenges," the OPM said in the report. "Each will be identified, acted upon and brought to resolution."
Panel: Age Doesn't Dictate Web 2.0 Fluency
Federal Computer WeekBy Wade-Hahn Chan
A panel of experts that included the founders of the
CIA's Intellipedia has challenged some perceptions about how people view next-generation Web applications.
The panel disputed the notion that younger people adopt Web 2.0 tools more easily than older people do. In some cases, the speakers said, the
reverse is true.
“The No. 1 contributor [to Intellipedia] is 69 years old,” said Don Burke, co-creator of the intelligence wiki at the CIA. The panel
met today at the FOSE 2008 conference sponsored by 1105 Media Group, which owns Federal Computer Week.
Burke said the recently retired employee posted his career’s worth of data and documents to the intelligence wiki.
On the other hand, John Thompson, an associate professor at Buffalo State College, said that much to his surprise, most of the graduate students
he teaches barely use Web 2.0 technologies.
“They have no clue,” Thompson said. “Most of my students have never seen a blog or used a blog, let along a podcast or
anything else.”
The panel also challenged the belief that allowing many people to edit and add information to a wiki would promote inaccuracy.
“When someone puts information out there, they’re tying their name, their identity to that information,” said Sean Dennehy,
Burke's colleague at the CIA and co-creator of Intellipedia. “If [the information] is wrong, we want to know who the idiots are.”
Dennehy said the barriers that prevent organizations from adopting new Web technologies are 90 percent cultural. He added that many subject-matter
experts were reluctant to put their information on Intellipedia because they wanted to remain the sole source of expertise in their fields.
“The next generation of subject-matter experts will be ones who have their information out there,” Dennehy said.
