YEARS AGO, long before the Fang family took over and nearly drove it into the ground, the San Francisco Examiner used to run a feature called Fat City, which was something like former senator William Proxmire's Golden Fleece awards, except even more dubious. Fat City drove me nuts: it always seemed to be aimed at allegedly overpaid city employees, or welfare cheats, or some poor middle manager who took too long of a lunch break or wrote his shopping list with a tax-paid pencil or put a city-owned battery into his personal flashlight.

This kind of stuff gets all the wrong people agitated for all the wrong reasons, and it stirs up antitax sentiment and leads to cuts in valuable services. The real Fat City, of course, was and is downtown, where big businesses and rich individuals are sitting on piles of cash – in many cases, thanks to local tax breaks or juicy public contracts.

So when Margaret Brodkin, who is almost always right, started calling me and telling me there was a huge amount of fat in the San Francisco Fire Department budget, I wasn't quite ready to stop the presses. Yeah, Margaret, I'm sure there's a little fat everywhere, but should we really be cutting public safety?

Then we actually looked at the numbers.

As Steven T. Jones reports on page 20, this isn't your typical pencils-and-pennies kind of waste. This isn't about preserving an essential, if sometimes pricey, public service. The amount of money getting burned up in the SFFD is monumental. The city could save a fortune just by taking a few steps into the modern world.

But the fire department, like the police department (another bloated sacred cow), isn't interested in real change. I've seen that for 20 years. In the early 1980s, the firefighters union bitterly resisted the concept of allowing women into the department. Until very recently, African American firefighters had to fight a lot more than fires to get a fair shot at promotions.

Now the union leaders are dissing the paramedics, who actually handle the majority of the fire department's calls these days.

Meanwhile, the firefighters union (like the police union) never seems to be around when progressives are looking for ways to bring in more money. It sides with Pacific Gas and Electric Co. against public power, doesn't support new tax programs, and endorses politicians who protect the rich.

Fat City.

Tim Redmond