Planned Fire Dept. Fees for Motorists Criticized

A plan by the New York Fire Department to allay severe budget cuts by charging motorists up to $490 to respond to accidents and car fires has touched off blistering criticism and calls for the City Council to outlaw the policy.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, nevertheless, is embracing the new fee proposal, which City Hall officials said would begin on July 1 and raise about $1.5 million annually.

The mayor, speaking on a weekly radio show on Friday, said there were few other palatable options for firefighters who are facing the challenge of doing more work with fewer resources.

Jason Post, a spokesman for the mayor, wrote in an e-mail on Saturday: “Other cities bill motorists and their insurance companies to recoup the costs of providing services that are commonly covered by automobile insurance companies, and now New York City will, too. We are going to search for other ways to shift costs away from overburdened taxpayers and towards accountable parties.”

Francis X. Gribbon, the Fire Department’s chief spokesman, said the plan — a draft rule of which was published Thursday in the City Record — would include a range of fees. The highest fee, $490, would apply when fire units respond to the locations of crashes or car fires that include injuries. For car fires with no injuries, the fee would be $415, Mr. Gribbon said. And for crashes in which no one is hurt, the fee would be $365, he said.

Several thorny questions have arisen over the Bloomberg administration’s move to enact the fees, including whether a layer of legislative input should apply. Whether such fees would be covered by insurance companies is also a matter of debate.

City officials said that while the proposal did not require legislation, it could not be enacted unilaterally. It must first pass the city’s rulemaking process. A public hearing is set for Jan. 14, at Fire Department headquarters in Downtown Brooklyn, said Steve L. Ritea, another department spokesman.

“We are accepting public opinion on it,” Mr. Ritea said. “We are in a budget crisis. We are talking about possible overnight firehouse closings and reducing manning, and these are difficult times and we are looking at anything.”

Michael F. Barry, a spokesman for the Insurance Information Institute, a national nonprofit consumer education agency that is financed by the insurance industry, said that while a number of municipalities around the nation have indeed imposed so-called crash taxes as a way to raise revenue, a number of state legislatures have banned them.

On Friday, Peter F. Vallone Jr., the chairman of the Council’s public safety committee, began drawing up legislation “to ban any city agency from charging fees for public-safety services without City Council approval,” he said.

In a telephone interview on Saturday, Mr. Vallone added: “Where does this end? Does the Police Department come in and say, ‘This store has too much shoplifting, we’re going to charge you if we have to come here again’?”

On the insurance question, James J. Wrynn, the superintendent of the New York State Insurance Department said, “Our understanding of the current status of automobile insurance policies is that this would not be a cost that they would pick up, under the physical damage coverage portion of a standard policy.”

Mr. Ritea said that both drivers involved in an accident would receive a bill, but that it would “indicate it can be forwarded to responsible party and their insurer,” which he said would pay the city. He said people without automobile insurance “would still be receiving that bill.”

Last year, the department answered 14,000 calls for vehicle accidents and car fires. Nearly 3,000 of them involved fires and 7,500 were accidents with injuries. About 3,500 others were accidents without injuries. If the department billed for all 14,000 accidents, at an average of $400 each — it would amount to about $5.5 million in revenue.

On Saturday, car owners greeted the idea with opposition. One man, Steven Telvi, 46, who was working at a gift shop he owns on the Upper East Side, said, “I think the city using the Fire Department to charge money for services is a disgrace.” Mr. Telvi, who was in a car accident in September, credited the Fire Department with responding first to his crash and said it was a pawn in a budget game.

“It is the guys downtown with the checkbooks,” he said. “If they need the ‘jaws of life,’ to cut you out of a car, is it going to cost extra?”

At an engine company in Manhattan, a firefighter said he and his colleagues were surprised by the city’s proposal. “It’s a tough situation,” he said. “The city is trying to find creative ways to save civil service jobs.” The firefighter, who declined to be identified because, he said, he was not allowed to speak to the news media while working, added: “I don’t think people will resent us, because it’s not our idea. We’ll respond whether we charge them or not.”