The Davis Enterprise argued in an Editorial yesterday that the city’s labor negotiations should be conducted in public. They used the conflict that emerged last month on the council dais, that started over a dispute between two members of the council as to what happened behind closed doors as an impetus to once again argue for public negotiations.
It is an interesting idea that was broached by the Enterprise last spring before the commencement of bargaining. However, the city cited confidentiality laws among other reasons for not conducting negotiations in public. I would argue that while they may be correct, there could have been a lot greater transparency during the process.
“The fact that closed-session discussions spilled over into the public arena gave local residents a brief peek into what’s typically a private affair. But taxpayers need more than a peek; discussions and decisions on labor contracts should be conducted in public.”
The editorial continues by arguing that the closed door bargaining has gone on too long and that these MOU labor agreements have not served to aid in the fiscal health of the city.
“The people who are paying the bills have a right to not only know how much a labor contract will cost them, but the people should be permitted to express their views on each deal before it is a fait accompli.
Most of the budget of the city of Davis goes to its workers. By concealing themselves in locked rooms with labor negotiators, the members of the council don’t get the input from citizens they need to make fully informed decisions on the most financially important decisions of the city.
To date, this lack of input and oversight has been costly.
The standard practice of the council in years past was to survey recent labor agreements in nearby communities to determine what wages and benefits Davis needs to offer to remain competitive. That makes sense, as long as one or more of our neighbors doesn’t give away more than we can afford. Unfortunately, some of our neighbors have been overly generous and, like lemmings, we have followed them over the cliff’s edge.”
Years ago while serving on the Davis School Board, Jim Provenza stood up to the majority of his colleagues, as well as then Superintendent David Murphy, and the Budget Director Tahir Ahad and refused to participate in what he considered to be inappropriate closed session meetings. He simply left the room, said it was inappropriate, and the rest of his colleagues followed him out.
One wonders what would have happened had Councilmembers Sue Greenwald and Lamar Heystek simply refused to participate in a process that they consider to be wrong.
I do not go as far as the Davis Enterprise editorial. I have seen enough fairly minor negotiations take place in public to realize that is not the place for negotiations.
Instead I would argue as I did several months ago that we needed a far greater amount of transparency in the budget process.
For instance, I have since learned that in San Diego, there was a blog site much like this one that posted the most recent offers from labor and management. The public could then see the trajectory of negotiations while at the same time the actual negotiations were done in private. This would have provided the transparency that the public needed to scrutinize and put pressure on the city while at the same time preserving the privacy needed to do appropriate negotiations.
That would have been a huge step up for the council.
An additional option would have been to have a one month sunshine period. After the agreement was reached, the Finance and Budget Commission would have had time to scrutinize the agreement and analyze the fiscal impact. The Commission requested that the city allow them to do this multiple times and they were rebuffed by the Council majority. That would have been a huge asset.
Instead what we had was a recipe for disaster. The council released the budget info on a Friday, and four days later at the Tuesday city council meeting the Mayor limited council discussion of that contract in public. As a result, we have had now three contracts that do not solve our fiscal problems literally shoved down our throats at the last minute by Ruth Asmundson, Don Saylor and Stephen Souza (the council majority) on 3-2 votes in the first two instances and by Asmundson, Saylor, Souza and Sue Greenwald on a 4-1 vote on the PASEA contract. Only Councilmember Lamar Heystek voted no on all the contracts due to his ongoing concern that these labor contracts did not address nor cure the longterm fiscal liability problems that the city is facing due to overly generous pay, benefit and retirement packages which have been granted to city employee bargaining groups over the past decade which are unsustainable and threaten the fiscal health of the city.
As the Davis Enterprise Editorial explained:
“THAT IS HOW DAVIS ended up with unfunded retiree medical benefits, extremely early retirements and spectacularly expensive pension plans. The other cities gave them to their workers, so we did, too. No one on the outside was paying attention, because no one in the public was allowed to participate in the process.”
The Editorial concludes:
“IT’S NEVER TOO LATE to change. We have to get tough and negotiate better deals, lest we find ourselves drowning in a sea of red ink in just a few years. The council needs to invite the public into the process and prove to us in the full glare of the sunlight that the salaries and benefits we promise city employees won’t drive Davis into insolvency.
And while we’re at it, let’s consider hiring professional negotiators to represent the taxpayers’ interests. Senior city officials may be perfectly good at their jobs as administrators, but that doesn’t necessarily make them good negotiators. We’d be better served by pros who make their living by driving hard bargains and forging equitable agreements.”
It is in fact too late for this time and the failure to achieve real structural reform will haunt us. The city appears to be gambling that they can accomplish pension reform by creating a two-tiered system outside of the labor negotiation process. As we have argued previously, we have a good deal of skepticism that that can occur and are opposed to the notion that newer employees will get worse deals than current employees.
—David M. Greenwald reporting
Agree. And to emphasize the dire straits that the current process has produced, headlines yesterday that City wants to begin using reserves. Was surprised that wasn’t your main story today.
Ok… negotiations in public… what would that look like?
Last spring, a goal was set to achieve ~$1,000,000 as a result of negotiations. If we were to have that magic time machine, how could it have played out? Would we have a public discussion of what the $ (or %-age goal) is? Would the “public” only be those who showed up at a given Council meeting? Would the public weigh in with their ideas how how much a savings was sought? How would the council decided on their goal? Let’s say ~1/3 of the public speaking wanted to see a 10-15% reduction, 1/3 wanted 5-10% reduction and 1/3 wanted to see a 0-5% increase, how would the council set their goal?
Or, pick a ‘topic’ area… let’s say, cafeteria cash out. How would the public discussion go on that?
I’m having a hard time visualizing how a public process would proceed. Does someone have an outline of what the process would look like for Davis? How would we engage the public who do not show up on a given Tuesday night? Or would we?
I need to be able to visualize a process before I can support or oppose the concept. David mentions two possible “pieces” of it… the posting of current offers, and the ‘sunshine’ period. These seem to be ‘late in the game’, after positions have been taken.
Can someone walk us thru what it could look like from goal-setting to conclusion?
hpierce:
I don’t think negotiations in the public are plausible. What I do think we can do is monitor progress of talks. I don’t think that’s late in the game because it would begin with the initial offers from both sides. I’ll have to find out where I can find some examples of this.
Since 3 of the MOU’s are fait accompli, can we get the copies of the proposals and counter proposals now, and walk thru what might have transpired if the offers had been public during the various stages?
My hpierce is that city would exclude a request from the public records act under the “deliberative” process exemption.
This is from the First Amendment Coalition’s Primer on the California Public Record Act ([url]http://www.thefirstamendment.org/publicrecordsact.pdf[/url]):
[quote]Appointment calendars and applications, phone records, and other records which impair the deliberative process by revealing the thought process of government decisionmakers may be withheld only if “the public interest served by not making the record[s] public clearly outweighs the public interest served by disclosure of the record[s].” (§6255; Times Mirror v. Superior Ct., 53 Cal.3d 1325 (1991); CFAC v. Superior Ct., 67
Cal.App.4th 159 (1998); Rogers v. Superior Ct., 19 Cal.App.4th 469 (1993)) If the interest in secrecy does not clearly outweigh the interest
in disclosure, the records must be disclosed, “whatever the incidental impact on the deliberative process.” (Times Mirror v. Superior Ct.) The agency must explain, not merely state, why the public interest does not
favor disclosure.[/quote]
. . in San Diego, there was a blog site much like this one that posted the most recent offers from labor and management.
I think that would work well in Davis, but the information should be posted on the City’s website.
Make that: “on the City’s website first.”
For years and years, I have been arguing to hire a professional negotiator, rather than to have our own staff represent us. Once, before Lamar was on the council, I prevailed for a brief period of time. Before that, the we had all been given the impression that the city had binding arbitration; i.e., that if the employees didn’t agree, we were entirely helpless because an outside entity would decide, and we were at risk that they could impose greater wages and benefits increases then we could get through the negotiations.
The professional negotiator explained that all of this was not true, that we did not have binding arbitration, and that after meeting and conferring and good faith bargaining, we could go to mediation, and if that failed, we could implement our last best offer.
After this discussion, the professional negotiator never came back. I was not told why. We went back to business as usual. I was given the impression that the mediation process could tie us up for years. It was only recently, upon direct questioning, that I was told that the mediation process is measured in weeks, not years.
David Greenwald did not mention the reasons I gave at the council meeting for voting for the PASEA contract.
First, for background: Believe it or not, we are not provided with an actual list of the salaries and total compensation for the positions within the bargaining groups when we are negotiating. In other words, we are often deciding salary increases or decreasing without knowing what the salaries are.
I had asked staff to provide me with a list of the positions and salaries for the groups. I never received them. I made a number of calls, saying that it was not only essential information for council members, but it was also public record. I got to the point where I had to explain that it would be pretty embarrassing to the city if a city councilmember in the midst of employee negotiations had to make a public records act request to see the actual salaries.
Finally, very recently, I received that information. I studied the actual salaries of those in PASEA, and quite a few of the salaries were low.
Then, I sent back and calculated what the cost to the city of the management contract would be over the baseline (last) fiscal year by the last year of the contract which starts in 18 months, compared to the cost to the city of the PASEA contract.
It turned out the management contract, which involves fewer and much more highly paid employees, would cost the city 2% over baseline in eighteen months, while the PASEA contract, with more employees and much lower salaries, would cost the city .8% over eighteen months.
I explained this at the council meeting and said that, while I had pledged to myself not to vote for a contract that did not make the needed structural reform of the cafeteria cash-out, that I was nevertheless appalled that the results of our negotiations had been regressive, and that the lowest paid workers had taken a proportionately larger share of the slowdown in the growth of the total compensation.
I just couldn’t bring myself to come down on the lowest-paid employees, when we had not received the needed concessions from management.
Correction:
Then, I went back and calculated what the cost to the city of the management contract would be over the baseline (last) fiscal year by the last year of the contract which starts in 18 months, compared to the cost to the city of the PASEA contract.
Our staff has never given us the impression that publicly releasing our offers before they were accepted would be legal under the ‘meet and confer” regulations. Are there any labor law experts out there who could post opinions? I would appreciate that. And once an offer has been made, can we back down from it? I have always argued that the council should be very cautious about the offers, since they lock us in.
A sunshine period can’t hurt, but again, once council has made an offer, could we legally back out if the public didn’t like the offer? I doubt it. Again, I would appreciate hearing any informed outside views.
Why do I need to go to the public to ask for direction concerning legal advice? It is because we don’t have a professional negotiator, although I have been advocating for one for years.
Sue: It seems you and Lamar need to retain your own independent council. It was Paul Navazio who told about what happened down in San Diego with the posting of the various offers. I can check with some labor people this week about the legality of it. I do know that the city’s idea of implementing a second tier system for new employees’ pensions outside of the collective bargaining process will not fly and will land the city in court.
Paid for out of our $500 a month salary?
I’d like to believe that you could find someone who would be able to represent you pro-bono for cases like this.
Ms Greenwald: the actual list of salaries are on the city’s webpage…. public information… maybe it’s not listed by bargaining groups, but as a Councilmember, I suspect that you could have requested that at any time.
Ms Greenwald’s suggestion for a professional negotiator is interesting… it makes sense from the perspective that neither Management nor Department Heads have EVER had any representatives other than themselves. Good idea to have a professional negotiator go up against individual employees in these two groups… probably will result in either those employees needing to hire their own professional negotiator (needing to “unionize” (which they probably would not) or put up their own money) or just the CC telling those employees what they are entitled to (w/o meet & confer)… good plan… Management and Department heads should have made big concessions & no cost of living, anyway, as they are ‘highly compensated’… see how long they stick around… maybe that is what is desired…
[quote]maybe it’s not listed by bargaining groups, but as a Councilmember, I suspect that you could have requested that at any time.
[/quote]hpierce, I did request that list many times and in a timely fashion, and I was continually told that staff was “working on it”, and did not receive it in a timely fashion.
[quote]I’d like to believe that you could find someone who would be able to represent you pro-bono for cases like this. [/quote]Hey, all you labor attorneys out there……
Ms Greenwald… the Mgt MOU is on-line on the city website. It contains all of the positions in Mgt, I believe… the city’s website has all the salaries, benefits, etc. for each classification (not all in one place, necessarily)….
Again, hpierce, the topic was the PASEA MOU, and during the period that the contract was being negotiated I had asked for a list with every position and its salary covered by the bargaining group, and again, I did not receive this list in a timely fashion. I was told that staff was “working on it”. If it was on the website, staff should have said “it is on the website — here is the link”. Since they did not say that, I assume it was not posted, at least during this period.
I only brought this up to explain the thought process I went through prior to voting for the PASEA contract. You seem to be trying to foment an argument over nothing.
After watching Governor Chris Christie’s budget speech, I never thought I would actually support a right wing republican agenda, but after watching this speech, I must say, they are not all bad. This speech is what we need from our California Governor Schwarzchneggar. You know, Arnold has done ABSOLUTELY nothing to solve the fiscal crisis we are in. Furloughs, and cuts, increases in taxes on the part of Arnold, and yet we are still still still in a state of fiscal crisis.
Governor Chris Christie rocks.
Take a cue from him Arnold.
you’ve done nothing for us Arnold except look good on airbrushed paper. Sodd off Arnold. We’re done with you.