Question: Have you, or a loved one, had your car stolen by a fire by chance? Were you mugged by Fire recently? Ok, seriously now, where did Fire touch you? Did Fire rape you? If you’re answering no for the most part and have just been robbed, mugged, raped and stabbed by humans while living in the city, then all together, this should be good news.

The St. Louis city Police Department will not have to lay off any officers this year! But, in an unrelated item, the Fire Department will have to lay off 30 firemen.

We’ll get to the firemen in a second, but this seriously is good news about the police. Especially considering that it was only a few weeks ago that Chief Isom was scaring everyone by saying that they might have to lay off five dozen…as in 60…officers this year. How they managed to go from 60 to zero, we don’t know, but that kinda math is fine by us! Yea! High fives! Oh…wait…chill. The Fire Department guys are looking at us. Stay cool.

Thirty St. Louis firefighters are being laid-off. In addition, another 24 positions are being cut through attrition. The layoffs will be based on seniority.

Both sides are blaming the other for not reaching an agreement. The mayor’s office claims no other city department is seeing the amount of pension increases that the fire department has. And, it claims the union is not willing to meet city officials “half-way” to reach an agreement.

A representative with [firefighters' union] Local 73, says the mayor’s office is lying to the public and that firefighters have worked in “good faith” trying to cut pension costs.

In summary St. Louisans: You’re screwed on fire protection, so maybe just not plug in that extra heater or ac window unit later this year. We will be protected by the police just as well as we have been for the last year…eh crap. Ok so the crime will still suck, but any future sudden snow this spring should melt quickly with all these extra fires around town.

That’s how we roll. Always looking on the bright side.

via KSDK (here and here)

East St. Louis you’re about to get that much worse.

Layoff notices have already gone out in East St. Louis, and 16 police officers could be gone as of January first.

The mayor says these layoffs are needed in order to get the city budget under control.

Budget issues are totally important, but maybe…maybe the police aren’t where we’d make the cuts seeing as though you’ve got people stealing church vans and smashing them in to ATMs the same day this all was announced.

To his credit, East St. Louis mayor Alvin Parks Jr., has said that he would be will to cut his salary in half to save some of those jobs. Other tactics taken by the mayor to keep these policemen on duty is to continually not show up for meetings between city and police officials where the budget would be talked about. Very smooth, but I think they are on to your game Mayor Parks.

“They mayor is not here, has not made a proposal to us except through the press, which I think is unprofessional. We had come to a rescheduled meeting from Friday that had been cancelled due to a lack of quorum. We were told to come to a meeting here today. This meeting got cancelled apparently without our notification,” says Fraternal Order of Police representative Bill Mehrtens.

A final decision on the matter is expected Thursday.

Frankly all of this would be a lot less important to us if we all just collectively started referring to East St. Louis as “West Chicago”.

via KSDK

Today Pfizer, which houses its research facility in the Chesterfield valley, announced that it would chop 600 of the 1,000 St. Louis jobs.

Damn dude.

Employees learned of the news at 11 a.m. today as Pfizer announced changes that will result in a R&D square-footage footprint that is 35 percent smaller.

The move comes as something of a shock since Pfizer only recently invested $250 million for new buildings and labs on its sprawling Chesterfield campus. Earlier this year Pfizer CEO Jeff Kinder dropped in for the facility’s dedication ceremony.

The good news?  If you are one of the remaining 400 employees, get ready to live the dream!

- Double offices (one is for your shoes)

- Always finding a seat in the lunch room!

- Bathroom lines?  What bathroom lines?!

- That back parking lot for chumps?  Guess who’s not a chump any more! (You.)

- Crippling depression because after barely making the cut yourself, having to watch your friends get escorted out by security and then wondering when the next layoff round is.   And did you hear? The hot chick from accounting got let go.  I know, the one with the brown hair!  Ah.  Damn, that really sucks.

Hey, 4 out of 5 ain’t bad!

This week in our apparently on-going feature of long time (and well-paid) Post Dispatch employees getting swept out the door and sending out “They tell me I have to say I’m leaving on my own or they won’t give me that extra money they promised” emails, we feature art critic David Bonetti.

He left the post “Farewell to the Lou” on his “Culture Club” blog Friday.

As some of you might have heard, I am leaving the Post-Dispatch. Today is my last day and this will be my last Culture Club post. Although some of the Cherokee Street clique would like to think that I was fired by an enlightened management that wants reviews of inept artists showing their woeful attempts at self-expression in vanity galleries, that is not the case. I took advantage of advanced age and a benefits package and decided to retire. I will move to Boston at some point.

As you can see, he’s planning on returning to the east coast, where he’s from, and because he’s from there he is bound by law apparently to go out like a dick.

I was born in New England and I miss the salt air, the good sea food and people who care more about where you got your Ph.d than where you went to high school. Call it snobism all you want, but the conversation is a lot better.

I do hate things about St. Louis: the willed ignorance, the racism, the smugness of the self-appointed social and cultural elite, the stupidity of the political class, etc. But it is hard to hate a city where you’ve lived for more than six years. Affection grows in spite of yourself.

We aren’t saying you are supposed to blindly love St. Louis.  In fact, no one takes more shots at our fair town than us, but this didn’t come off as humorous or as helpful, just as a dick move.  So for the first time, we are siding with Post Dispatch ownership on this salary dump.  Not to be left out, the Post Dispatch commenters that took the time to drop in a few goodbye love notes at the foot of his last post.

Here are the best of the bunch:

I’ve never read your stuff before. I surfed in from GO St. Louis post on Facebook. And I’d just like to say…WOW…this was quite possibly the douchiest thing I’ve ever read by a professional journalist. Congrats!

— Tom

Let’s see. You want to escape racism and the smugness of the self-appointed social and cultural elite, so you’re moving to … Boston. Good luck with that.

— solong

Even those who know you have to agree: This is douchey.

Since your fake compliments highlight your negativity, so will mine: Glad you found some things to not completely condescend about. Hope you get over your failure-to-accept-difference issues. Perhaps crawling back into Mom’s — I mean Massachusetts! — womb is the easiest answer. Happy trails.

— um

Sorry to break the news to you, but the art community doesn’t dislike you because you’re some sort of “radical” voice who plays by his own tune. You’re simply a whiny, pretentious, stereotypical art snob who feels the need to talk down to anyone and everyone they meet. You’ll fit in better on the east coast, where people put on airs and circle-jerk themselves into a frenzy. No one owes you anything because you’re an art critic. In fact, the very idea of an art critic has routinely been proven useless throughout history, and you are no different. Have fun in retirement, knowing that your reviews influenced absolutely no one, being paid to schmooze with morons with more money than sense.

— supersleuth

And lastly, from a guy that has clearly worked with him at the PD…

“…decided to retire”, eh? Good one. The (hacky) writing’s been on the wall for you for a while now.

— oh, please

KMOV has cut 10 jobs, the majority of which are salespeople we hear.  The only “name” we’ve heard being cut is Tim Tialdo from our favorite show “Great Day St. Louis”

Anyone else have any word on this or know the others that were let go?