I was a rookie police reporter when I first encountered the sometimes surprising animosity between Houston police and firefighters.

One hot summer day more than 30 years ago, a firefighter holding onto the back of a truck as it sped through downtown Houston lost his grip and fell to the street, hitting his head on the concrete. I arrived on the scene just as he was loaded into an ambulance, the injured man looking dazed but conscious and alert. I didn’t think much of it, so I filed a brief story for KTRH Radio after I returned to the grubby press room at police headquarters.

I later mentioned it to a detective sitting in the homicide division. He was one of the guys I’d come to know while covering more murders than I care to remember, so I suppose he felt comfortable imitating a child’s voice to crack a tasteless joke:

“Oh my, did da widdle fireman bump his pumpkin head?”

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Gallows humor was common around the cop shop, but I suspect the detective wouldn’t have joked if he’d known the firefighter would later die from his injuries.

That conversation happened in 1982. It came to mind last week as I watched a city council committee hearing at which the intramural antipathy between Houston police and firefighters came into sharp focus. The meeting highlighted the projected cost of the firefighter union’s pay parity proposal, which is apparently - and finally - on its way to a polling place near you.

Firefighter union leaders were so blasted mad about the meeting, they didn’t even bother to attend. As far as they’re concerned, the city council’s only job now is to put the proposal before Houston voters, thousands of whom signed petitions to put the plan on the ballot. But Mayor Sylvester Turner - whom the firefighters endorsed in the last election - wants to hammer home the idea that the parity proposal will cost a fortune.

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A Turner administration budget official estimated the firefighters’ plan would cost the city as much as $98 million a year, and Fire Chief Sam Pena raised the specter of covering the difference by laying off firefighters. But the most strident testimony came from leaders of the Houston Police Officers’ Union, who basically pulled off the gloves and pounded the daylights out of the parity plan forwarded by what one of them called their “brothers and sisters” in the fire department.

“Our job functions are completely different,” said Joe Gamaldi, the police union president. “I’m not bad mouthing the fire department when I say it is within their policy to sleep while they are at work. We are strictly prohibited from doing that.”

Gamaldi is an energetic public speaker whose rapid-fire delivery could shame an auctioneer. One of his colleagues, former HPOU President Ray Hunt, jokingly assured the council members “this is his normal voice, he’s not yelling at y’all.” But that didn’t stop Gamaldi from almost shouting that parity is “an albatross,” that has “crippled” police departments in other major cities.

“We didn’t ask to be dragged into this fight,” Gamaldi said. “We were brought into it when they came up with this parity petition.”

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Hunt pointedly emphasized that he’d never seen Houston police officers more united than they are now in their opposition to parity. They know there’s a limited pool of funds in the city’s coffers, and they know that tying their pay to firefighters would vastly complicate future contract negotiations - just as it did decades ago.

When the firefighters’ parity plan finally goes to voters, we’ll probably see them positioned outside polling places throughout the city, lobbying for last minute support. When they get upset, firefighters get politically active.

So now I think back on that conversation I had in the homicide division three decades ago. And I wonder if, as the parity plan goes before voters, Houston police officers will muster the same political passion as their “brothers and sisters” in the fire department.

Miller was a broadcast news reporter who spent more than 25 years in local television before joining the Houston Chronicle Editorial Board in 2016