With encouragement from several vocal mayors and municipal organizations, Governor Carcieri has mounted a legislative bid to keep police and firefighters unions from securing contractual requirements for minimum staffing on work shifts.

If it wins passage, the proposal, long advocated by municipal leaders across the state, would change arbitration laws and eventually make it easier for cities and towns to work with reduced personnel levels, share public safety resources and pay less overtime. Critics, including various union leaders, say that such staffing cuts could jeopardize public safety.

The change is among a handful of proposals that Carcieri has put forward at the request of the Rhode Island League of Cities and Towns and several mayors. It is attached to his legislation for cutting state spending and slashing aid allocations to cities and towns.

Faced with staggering overtime bills, local officials, including North Providence Mayor Charles A. Lombardi, say they have many ways to pool resources and ensure sufficient personnel levels during emergencies.

Paying overtime isn’t necessary when sickness keeps one or two firefighters out, Lombardi maintains.

“We don’t mind paying firefighters and police officers when they come to work,” he said. “The problem we have is we can no longer afford to pay you if you’re not coming to work.”

What he means is that the town must pay overtime to a substitute firefighter, and also make good on sick pay, whenever a firefighter calls in sick. The town pays an extra 150 percent for coverage in that case.

At the current rate, this could cost North Providence an additional $650,000 in the budget year that ends June 30, Lombardi said.

“The firefighters ask, ‘Do you know what we do?’ ” said the mayor, who was a volunteer firefighter for 21 years. “My answer to them is, ‘Yeah, I do. I know what you do.’ ”

The legislative proposal would rewrite passages in the firefighters and police arbitration laws to make it clear that minimum staffing levels and several other job factors, such as the deployment of personnel and the types of equipment they use, have been excluded from the various working conditions that are subject to collective bargaining.

Joseph F. Penza Jr., a lawyer who started negotiating contracts for police unions in 1974, says the minimum staffing rule helps ensure officers are deployed in sufficient number to support each other in life-threatening situations.

Unions bargained the requirement into their contracts at a price, Penza says. That price, he suggested, might represent as much as a half-percentage point of annual pay raises.

“Over the years,” he says, “we have given up a substantial amount of salary if you add it up.”

However, over the years various unions also realized that minimum staffing was a way to protect overtime income, according to Vincent F. Ragosta Jr., a lawyer representing North Providence in the town’s arbitration with local firefighters.

“They now basically cemented into their contracts a financial mandate for all the cities and towns that operate fire departments,” Ragosta says.

Warwick Mayor Scott Avedisian says his city’s contract requires 46 firefighters on each shift and its overtime spending exceeds $1 million a year.

Freedom from the minimum staffing requirement would help the department avoid some degree of overtime spending while it trains new recruits to replace as many as 40 firefighters who are expected to retire in the near future, Avedisian says.

In Cranston, the contract requires 41 firefighters on each shift.

“It’s not that there’s a willingness to compromise public safety at all,” said the newly appointed director of administration, Robin A. Schutt.

“Whenever a minimum staffing level is put into a contract, it really limits management and fire leadership as to what is the best staffing level at any given time,” Schutt said.

Cranston won’t receive immediate relief if the law is changed because the current firefighters’ contract hasn’t expired yet.

Carcieri’s spokeswoman, Amy Kempe, said the language was intended to affect future contracts or existing agreements if they are reopened.

In North Providence, the agreement with firefighters expired in July. Lombardi says he would be free to act as soon as the new law is enacted.

But John Silva, president of the North Providence firefighters union, says the firefighters have the right to work under the expired contract until they get a new deal.

The minimum staffing requirement isn’t a “vested property right” such as wages or benefits, says Ragosta. “The firefighters have no constitutional right in guaranteed overtime.”

Silva and other union leaders, including Marc Fontenault, a Warwick firefighter and union president, say the unions will lobby against the proposal. Scrimping on staffing makes it harder for firefighters to respond swiftly to fires and medical emergencies, they say.

The president of Cranston’s firefighters union, Paul Valletta Jr., said his department’s staffing is already below guidelines set by the National Fire Protection Association. The department deploys three or four firefighters on its engines when it should staff five, he said.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea to put minimum staffing in the hands of elected officials who really have no idea what it’s like to be in a fire truck and go to a fire,” Valletta said.

mreynold@projo.com