Opinion - Letters to the Editor

Thursday, Aug. 07, 2008

Viewpoint: SLO tried to avoid binding arbitration

Comments (0) |

Several letters have been written lately supporting the ruling of an outside arbitrator that will take the average pay of a San Luis Obispo police officer into six-figure territory. It is no surprise that the Police Officers’ Association (POA) supporters would defend this expensive ruling; many appear to be friends and family, live outside of SLO and won’t have to pay the cost.

What is surprising are the questions that many arbitration defenders keep asking, like those posed by letter writers from Cayucos and Cambria on July 22. If the City Council dislikes binding arbitration, one writer wonders, why didn’t we just settle our differences with the POA and avoid going to arbitration? The other writer wonders if the city would be “as inflamed” if the arbitrator’s decision had gone in our favor? To answer the first question, we simply couldn’t settle our differences with the POA without breaking faith with every other employee group that we had already settled with and without sending the message that we reward extreme demands. Regarding the second question, of course things would not be so “inflamed” if the city didn’t have to cut projects and services in order to pay an extreme award.

That said, SLO City Councils have long opposed binding arbitration as a method of resolving labor differences. Win, lose or draw, it is a terrible and expensive process.

Could the city have compromised? We did. The city offered the POA a total package that was better than what every other city employee group agreed to, including the Fire Union. That wasn’t accepted by POA leaders. They wanted a package that was more than double the cost of our best offer and included 100 percent lifetime medical coverage for retired employees. To pay this final POA proposal retroactively would have cost $9 million — close to the annual cost of the whole Police Department. Going forward, the proposal would have cost $4 million annually—about the equivalent of the annual Parks and Recreation Department operating budget.

Should we have met the POA “half way?” How does one meet such a negotiating partner half way when the demand is so far out of reach that even half way would have had terrible fiscal and internal consequences? Half way between our best offer and theirs would have actually been more expensive than the final arbitration ruling.

Over many years, the city has successfully negotiated dozens of timely and very fair labor contracts with all of our employee groups. This is because we have a tradition of respecting our employees and negotiating in good faith.

However, since binding arbitration entered the Charter, negotiations with the POA have taken significantly longer, from about five months between a contract ending and a new contract being ratified to about 20 months. And the issues and demands raised by the POA have become extreme in both number and cost. Eventually, we had to take a stand on behalf of our citizens, the other employee groups and the diverse services that we provide.