What are you doing New Year’s 1999?

Every year AFSCME members across the country work to make New Year’s Eve celebrations come off without a hitch. This year’s “millennium madness” will be no different. Just a whole lot bigger.

New York’s Times Square is pulling out all the stops with a 24-hour-long blast scheduled to begin the morning of Dec. 31. AFSCME Locals 3621 and 2507 (DC 37), representing the city’s emergency medical personnel, will be out in force.

Don Rothschild, president of Local 3621, says that in years past, squads divided the Times Square area into quadrants. Two mobile emergency rooms were set up on either end, with ambulances and other equipment standing by for serious cases.

EMT personnel also usually rove as “foot teams,” to treat less serious cases on the spot and try to head off any potentially dangerous activity, though the crush of the crowds this year may preclude that, Rothschild said.

In Las Vegas, where every night is New Year’s Eve, Department of Transporta-tion employees, members of the AFSCME-affiliated State of Nevada Employees Association, will work double shifts to clear trash and keep the party litter-free, says Linda Covelli, supervisory employee representative in the Las Vegas office.

The city anticipates that twice the 500,000-750,000 people who overflowed the famous Strip for last year’s celebration will turn out to greet the new century.

“The employees did a super job in cleanup last year,” says Covelli, after revelers tore up more than $10,000 worth of landscaping. “It takes a lot of skill — and sometimes a little tact — to work among people who’ve been out there drinking for a while.”

In contrast, it would be tough rounding up a million people for a New Year’s Eve bash in Butte, Mont., even for one commemorating the new century.

“We don’t even have a million people in the state,” jokes Don Kinman, executive director of AFSCME Council 9, which includes the police departments of Butte, Helena, Miles City, Glendive and Laurel.

Most of the New Year’s Eve revelry is confined to private homes and the local bars, which sell tickets and then close off for private parties. Kinman doesn’t think it’ll be much different this year, and that suits Montanans just fine.

New Year’s is low-key, he shrugs. “We draw more people for the rodeos.”