“As has been explained to Mayor Breed, she and all other candidates will be invited to address the membership as a whole in a free and fair debate,” reads the article. That debate will be held on Thursday, at the ungodly hour of 9:30 a.m.

With the dawn debate scheduled for this week, this is something to think about. While some in Breed’s camp (perhaps preemptively) said the firefighters’ endorsement ain’t what it used to be, it certainly seems everyone was working very hard to get it. The firefighters will have their own pension measure on the ballot, and they will be campaigning hard. The question is: For whom?

You may not be fluent in the arcana of government bureaucracy or firefighting or firefighting jargon. But going “out of service” is what you think it is: While the mayor was having a meeting with firefighters, this memo stated that they were to be “out of service” — that is, not answering calls.

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“The Mayor’s Office stated that the Honorable Mayor would like to visit every station in 2024,” reads a March fire department memo. “The Mayor’s Office is NOT able to pre-schedule these, due to the mayor’s busy schedule. To accommodate this request, the following shall be done … ”

“Your humble narrator” was a writer and columnist for SF Weekly from 2007 to 2015, and a senior editor at San Francisco Magazine from 2015 to 2017. You may also have read his work in the Guardian (U.S. and U.K.); San Francisco Public Press; San Francisco Chronicle; San Francisco Examiner; Dallas Morning News; and elsewhere.

SFFD Public Information Officer Lt. Mariano Elias insists that this March memo was a “draft.” It was never in effect. He notes that this dictum was quickly stricken; not only were firehouses instructed to stay in service when the mayor was present, but Breed even rode along on the fire rig when a call did, indeed, come in during one of her subsequent visits.

The mayor’s quest to visit all 49 firehouses in 2024 did not go smoothly. We are told that a trip to Station 3 to pay respects to the colleagues of Lt. Stephen Silvestrich, who died unexpectedly in April at age 51, became an unanticipated quiz session from fire personnel about homelessness, drug policy and, most uncomfortably of all, the city’s vaccine mandate.

“Every one of these candidates was going above and beyond, even going over the heads of union leadership to try to get to the general membership,” said Wood. “Well,” he laughs. “It’s gonna get settled real soon.”

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Your newspaper is biased, not telling the truth about all candidates. Are you getting paid to do news? http://www.MayorEllen.com Ellen, Republican mayoral candidate for all San Francisco, including the sick and evil leaders destroyed San Francisco for many years!

In 2018, there was no more fervent backer of Breed’s mayoral run than the firefighters. Perhaps 500 to 700 volunteers walked the streets for her; the firefighters (92 percent approval) were the public face of an independent expenditure campaign funded in large part by tech barons and captains of industry (who poll a lot lower).

Rather, candidates merely ask questions about the job and what the firefighters would need. Within reason, every San Franciscan, mayoral candidate or not, is entitled to walk into a firehouse and ask these sorts of questions (and use the restroom). “We are friendly people,” concedes Lt. Elias.

In any event, the firefighters are a boffo endorsement for any candidate to get. People really like firefighters. People understand what they do, and they turn out brigades of on-the-ground political volunteers. In a city where few things work well or properly, San Franciscans can count on firefighters to rapidly and effectively address their fire or medical emergencies, despite inherent life-safety issues and carcinogenic equipment.

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“Simply to have an informational meeting doesn’t justify a delayed response time to an emergency,” sums up Adam Wood, the secretary of the firefighters’ Local No. 798 union.

By April, after she’d dropped by three or four firehouses, an article ran in the firefighter union’s newsletter. It compared the mayor’s visits to “captive audience meetings” used by union-busting bosses, but also by “employers and politicians pushing a political agenda.” The firefighters union, in short, was not amused.

According to internal polling, 92 percent of San Franciscans have a favorable impression of firefighters. The other 8 percent? Jilted ex-spouses.

The missive instructs firefighters not to pose for photographs while in their uniforms, and reminds them that overtly political activity within a firehouse is verboten. Then it goes to an unusual place: “Officers shall forward an Unusual Occurrence report for the date and time of any political candidate’s visit to a Fire or EMS station to the Chief of the Department through the Chain of Command.”

Fair enough: The fire department never intended for its “draft” memo to circulate among fire personnel. But it ended up doing just that, and rankling those fire personnel. It made its way outside of the firehouses and into the hands of the media, all the way back in March. And, draft or no draft, how could that language ever find its way in here? Going out of service is no small thing: Remember that Fire Department paramedic who was fired a few years back for having sex in the back of the ambulance? Yeah, that was bad. But the real sin, we’re told, was less the sex and more that he went out of service to do it.

You may have noticed that fire department management crafted an extensive game plan to accommodate the mayor’s stated desire to visit every firehouse in her re-election year, but management is asking its workforce to sound the alarm when her competitors do the same. Others have.

On top of everything else, it would also be a political disaster for fire personnel to be delayed or prevented from responding to an emergency because they were sitting in a meeting with the mayor. This, the mayor’s office insists, is not something they asked for or even wanted.

Firefighters show up and they put out fires; very rarely do they show up and burn down your home. So, people like them. A lot. And politicians want a piece of that. Do they ever.

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So the firefighters union, in essence, asking the mayor to stop bothering them and show up for a breakfast-hour forum just like everyone else is an icy rebuke. The bloom is off that rose and the mayor, no fool, took the hint. She has reportedly not returned to a firehouse.

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“It has come to the Department’s attention that political candidates have been visiting firehouses,” reads a July 2 email from SFFD brass to the workforce.

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No one is under any pretensions as to why the mayor and her competitors are paying these visits, but there’s a difference between campaigning and campaigning. It’d be one thing if our aspirational mayors were swooping in with camera crews or posters or asking for votes or endorsements or money. No one is doing that.

Managing Editor/Columnist. Joe was born in San Francisco, raised in the Bay Area, and attended U.C. Berkeley. He never left.

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Check yourself Ellen Zhao (if this is really you posting on a public and independent media site.) While It is possible that someone impersonating candidate Zhao is here hoping to make that candidate look crazy, unhinged and rabid, it is also possible that this individual has no understanding of how a legitimate candidate running for democratically elected office comports themselves. If you hope to alienate San Francisco voters, keep it up.

The candidates are “just trying to be the most-seen person in the firehouse,” explains a firefighter source. “It’s the Scott Wiener school of campaigning. You meet every voter four times, so even if they don’t agree with you, they vote for you.”

San Francisco voters have never said no to more benefits for SFFD or SFPD. A mayoral candidate had better be good to them, to Chinese groups, to LBGT+groups – these groups deliver votes.

Asking firefighters to sacrifice a goat would be only a shade less incongruous than mandating them to go out of service for an election-year visit with a politician.

The Northern California branch of the Society of Professional Journalists named Eskenazi the 2019 Journalist of the Year.

What follows are seven different steps explaining how the fire department would accommodate the mayor’s desire to visit all 49 firehouses in this election year. It was No. 5 that caught the firefighters’ attention:

The on-call-PIO will notify the SFFD command staff, the appropriate Division Chief, the battalion Chief, and the Station Officer of the visit. The station will be out of service for the duration of the event.

The fire department is losing its battle with the dictionary, however, regarding the word “unusual.” Daniel Lurie’s campaign confirmed about five firehouse visits, Mark Farrell a dozen and Ahsha Safaí nine (though he says he was only doing so in his capacity as a supervisor). Aaron Peskin says he has not visited any firehouses — which he thought was intrusive — but did note that “the firefighters’ endorsement is coveted, and I covet it.”