EAST PROVIDENCE — The city’s firefighters are vehemently opposed to the city manager’s proposal to cut 28 positions from their department while simultaneously increasing the remaining staff’s work week by 33 percent without a corresponding salary boost.

City Manager Richard Brown’s budget for fiscal year 2010 — which begins Nov. 1 in East Providence — recommends eliminating two vacant positions and laying off 26 of the least senior firefighters. It also calls for ridding the department of one its four platoons and changing the work week to 56 hours with 24-hour shifts. Firefighters’ contributions to health care will also increase to 20 percent if approved by the council next month.

Brown believes this will save the city nearly $1.34 million during a year when state aid is being cut $4 million and city officials have agreed to give the school district more money for its students and deficit.

The firefighters’ current work week is 42 hours long. East Providence Fire Fighters Local 850 president Paul B. Cotter said the current contract calls for two 10-hour day shifts, two 14-hour night shifts and four days off. Most firefighters’ health-care contribution is $14 per week.

“It’s absolutely ludicrous,” Cotter said Thursday. “We’d be laying off people with over 10 years experience and we’ve always been the first to step up [when the city had financial woes]. We were the first to co-share health-care costs and adjust prescription co-share amounts. You’d think they would remember that, but not this council or at least some members of it.”

Cotter specifically named Mayor Joseph S. Larisa Jr., who in an August publication said the local fire union members “just don’t get it.”

Larisa said East Providence is “in the middle of the worst recession in the history of our city” and the union’s first proposal to the bargaining table “demands” 44 new firefighters and a 6-percent salary increase. He also said it didn’t include any increases to “the small healthcare co-share paid right now.” The union’s contract expires Oct. 31, 2009.

Cotter, who has been the president for the past five years and a city firefighter for 20 years, said sides during negotiations initially “shoot for the top and get what they can get based on what is good for everyone.” He said the union didn’t expect to get the raise or additional staff.

“We get it,” Cotter said. “We know the climate of the city.”

He said the union presented another proposal Sept. 22 that would have saved the city $1.4 million, the same amount Brown’s proposal is projected to save. Cotter said the union proposal includes doubling their health-care co-shares to $28 week. The union also agreed to 24-hour shifts in a 42-hour work week. The three-year proposal didn’t have a salary increase until the third year, which was 4-percent in fiscal year 2012.

“The city manager said he could not sell it to the council,” Cotter said. “We’ve watched what they did to the teachers, the police and now us. I wonder if this is really about saving money or is this really about trying to break us. I can’t speak for the other unions, but they’re not going to break us.”

Said Larisa Friday, “We need real cuts and not phony-baloney cuts. This is about the city living within its means and we have less money, not more, to work with …”

Larisa said he didn’t think negotiations with the fire union have broken down yet. Arbitration is scheduled to begin in early December.

apina@projo.com