Turning Outrage into Action

By Rudizink

Any lingering doubts about the true motives of Boss Godfrey's administration in connection with 2006 police and firefighter salary "negotiations" were resolved yesterday, we believe, in this matter-of-fact John Patterson guest editorial. Boss Godfrey and his minions are punishing our police and firefighters, and they are doing it blatantly.

In truth, it's obvious that there were no good-faith salary negotiations during the winter run-up toward finalizing our public safety officers' pay plans. Mr. Patterson makes no bones about that. As City Administrator Patterson forthrightly admits, Boss Godfrey initially tendered an identical "take it or leave it offer" to all city employees. When our public safety employees had the temerity to exercise their rights under currently-operative administration/council Joint Resolution 95-9, and plead their case before the city council in the very manner contemplated by the resolution, city administrators, acting in apparent "bad faith," summarily took their initial offer "off the table."

It's important to recognize that "reaching impasse" was not intended to be interpreted as a negotiations "dead end," under Joint Resolution 95-9, as originally conceived. Nor should the reaching of impasse be interpreted as a rejection of the administration's initial offer, as Std-Ex headline writers mis-characterize it. Impasse is just another step in the process of implementing Joint Resolution 95-9, as originally designed under the wise governance of former Mayor Mecham's much-missed city administration. It was intended as just another angle of approach. In point of fact, it's the first opportunity in the process for employee groups to have direct contact with the only city government body which actually has legal authority to approve any employee pay plan.

Notably, paragraph 7 of the Joint Resolution provides as follows:

7. If a consensus is not reached between the City and employee representatives on wage and benefit issues, a City Council hearing will be scheduled for employee representatives to present their position.

The object of this provision could not be more clear. The city council is the municipal body ultimately designated by the state legislature to control the city purse-strings, including the approval of employee pay-plans. Paragraph 7 merely provides the logical legal mechanism to bring unresolved employee salary issues before the legislatively-designated decision-making body, on occasions when duly-delegated administration and employee representatives cannot reach their own consensus.

There are several aspects of Mr. Patterson's article which we find deeply troubling.

First, Mr. Patterson's commentary smacks of bush league gamesmanship:

"When the two unions went to impasse they were fully aware that what the administration had offered them was no longer on the table. Both unions were betting that by going to impasse the City Council would give them more than was offered by the administration. That ended up not being the case."

Unfortunately Mr. Patterson fails to honestly inform us why the initial offer was taken off the table. It seems to us that the more even-handed strategy would to have left the initial offer open, at least until the city council had been afforded the opportunity to take a look at it, rather than to have played games with hard-working public safey employees' livelihoods.

Secondly, Mr. Patterson offers this statement:

Much has been said about how much we pay our public safety employees, and some have expressed views that it is not enough. As we do comparative surveys, we do fairly well against other cities. Below is the total compensation (salary and benefits) for our police and firefighters.

Police officers: entry, $57,559.63; middle, $68,037.28; top, $87,008.95.

Firefighters: entry, $38,764.40; middle, $52,562.37; top, $70,962.85.

While Mr. Patterson prefaces these paragraphs with reference to "comparative surveys," he entirely fails to offer any actual comparative evidence. Moreover, he blithely rattles off gross employee cost figures, which include insurance premiums, 401-k contributions and other items which don't translate into take-home pay, as if to befuddle Standard-Examiner readers and pose the question: "Isn't this enough?"

No it isn't enough. Ask any police officer who risks life and limb to feed his family. The average street cop earns about $15 an hour before payroll deductions, so we are told, which places our public safety officers at the low end of the salary range for similarly-employed officers in neighboring jurisdictions.

In this connection, we invite any readers who have more information on comparative salaries to chime in, to better inform our gentle readership of the relative ranking of local public safety officers in the northern Utah region.

Finally, there's this bald and implausible John Patterson pronouncement:

We are very proud of the great work that our police officers, firefighters and all of our city employees do. We have taken great effort to compensate them in a manner that is fair to them and to the taxpayers. It's a difficult balance, but we are committed to stay competitive in the market so that we can have the best people working for us.

This statement is patently untrue, and will remain untrue, until our public safety officers are restored to parity with all other city employess, we believe. So long as these elite city employees continue to be punished for exercising the legal rights that were afforded under the 11-year old joint resolution, Mr. Patterson's references to "pride" and "fairness" will continue to ring hollow, and Ogden's Finest will continue to be treated as second-class employees.

(Close browser window to return to main page)