All five major candidates running for Mayor of San Francisco are putting on a full-court press chasing the SF firefighters’ union endorsement, but the candidates’ very frequent visits to local fire departments may be burning their chances of winning brownie points.

There is yet another San Francisco mayoral debate scheduled for this Thursday, July 18, but the audience for this one may not be very large. As Mission Local points out, the debate is scheduled for 9:30 am on Thursday morning. Yet all five major candidates will surely show up on time and dutifully at that early hour, because this debate is sponsored by the SF firefighters’ Local No. 798 union, and as Mission Local points out, all the candidates are pursuing that endorsement aggressively.

Yes, everyone loves firefighters — they save people’s lives, and occasionally also save baby raccoons. But some candidates may be pursuing that firefighters’ union endorsement a little too aggressively, and might be getting in the way of the firefighters actually doing their jobs. That Mission Local article covers several examples of this, one of them being Mayor London Breed’s vow that she would visit all 49 San Francisco fire stations in 2024, which of course, 2024 is the year she’s up for reelection.    

And some firefighters felt burned. An internal firefighter’s union newsletter complained that the on-duty firefighters would be forced into “captive audience meetings” during Breed’s visits. Additionally, Mission Local obtained an internal department memo that said each time Breed would visit a fire station, “The station will be out of service for the duration of the event.” Yes, that means that department would not be taking actual emergency calls while Breed was visiting the station in question.  

“If there’s one thing we don’t do,” a fire department source told Mission Local, “it’s go out of service. That is why the guys got furious.”

The fire department tried to extinguish that controversy among the ranks, saying the memo was only a “draft,” and the rule was never enacted. And oddly, Breed’s office seems keen to deflect responsibility for that memo to the fire department itself.

“That was certainly not the mayor’s idea,” Breed’s spokesperson Parisa Safarzadeh said to Mission Local. “That had to come from the fire department.”

But all of the candidates running for mayor are trying to burnish their credentials as the one most beloved by the SF Fire Department. We’ll embed their tweets throughout this post, like Mark Farrell’s July 4 tweet above with his posing around SF fire trucks.

Mission Local notes that Farrell has visited SF fire stations 12 times since announcing his candidacy, Daniel Lurie has visited five, and Supervisor Ahsha Safai has visited stations nine times, though claims he did so only in his official duties as a supervisor. Aaron Peskin said he hasn’t visited any, because he doesn’t want to to get in their way, but told Mission Local that “the firefighters’ endorsement is coveted and I covet it.”

The department, however, seems none too thrilled with all of these politician visits. “It has come to the Department’s attention that political candidates have been visiting firehouses,” Fire Department leaders wrote to employees in a July 2 email obtained by Mission Local.  The email directed firefighters to not pose for pictures with the candidates, and to report any suspiciously apparent political activity, adding, “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.”

For his part, Peskin has scored one recent legislative win with the fire department: his ban on cancer-causing “forever chemicals” in SF firefighters’ gear that passed in May. That was a minor political victory, but the department is also looking for bigger political wins in November. There will be November ballot measures asking voters to lower the department’s retirement age from 58 to 55, and let firefighters (and police) collect pension and salary at the same time if they’re eligible.

This is one of those practices that a recent Chronicle op-ed lambasted, saying “Supes still want to hand out new pension benefits like Tic Tacs” at a time when the city is running a nearly $800 million deficit. But given the political headwinds among the SF mayoral candidates, one imagines they will all campaign in favor of the fire department getting some extra sugar.

Related: Victim In Brutal Alleged SF Firefighter-On-Firefighter Attack Speaks Out, Story Even Crazier Than We Realized [SFist]

Image: @LondonBreed via Twitter