One alderman said if the city ran its own ambulance service, it wouldn’t be dealing with an unfair labor practice complaint that’s resulted in a settlement. The Springfield City Council Wednesday agreed to a one percent pay raise for firefighters. They’ve had to learn and perform Advanced Life Support to help local ambulance crews.

The terms of the settlement do not sound good to Ald. Roy Williams, who said, “Why is everybody getting one percent, because I’m looking at this figure, and i am going, we have got to only do those that got into an ambulance. Those are the ones we are going to retroact. Those are the ones who were harmed and need to be made whole and all that kind of language. “I don’t understand how we as a council can authorize to just do it across the board to every fireman just because they had to train.”

Alds. Larry Rockford and Lakeisha Purchase voted Present.

You can bet the firefighters union will remember all of this when the next contract negotiations come up.