09-22-08 Common Council Minutes - Laserfiche WebLink

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REGULAR MEETING SEPTEMBER 22, 2008 agreement which the Board of Public Safety will act upon and then approved by the Council. In light of the Chief’s being present this evening, she wanted to give them a special note of recognition. The fire negotiations were again a joint effort between the Common Council, Board of Public Safety, Fire Administration and the City Administration. The teams reached a one year agreement with regard to the fiscal nature only. Those items are addressed in the proposed ordinance before the Council tonight. They address wage and monetary fringe benefits. Again, both teams work under difficult financial situations as have been highlighted by members of the team as well as the Council President. She stated that it is important to point out however, both the police union and the fire union to the best of her knowledge are the only unions in the City of South Bend that have repeatedly offered to give up programs that are funding services and programs within their individual departments and to use those monies to help fund wage or fringe benefit increases. Again, the City Team applauded those efforts and repeatedly asked creative ideas based on the guidelines that were given through the executive sessions of the Council and City Administration. The proposal this evening is within the guidelines which were given to the team. One of the items that the fire union agreed to work on is to have the education tuition reimbursement program, which again has been in effect for about five years, that the funding for that would be cut by 50% for next year with those monies being used to help pay for some of the monetary fringe benefits. Across the board the sworn members of the fire department they are recommended a 1.65% increase which would not take effect until April 3, 2009. Again, by staggering the increases it allow the opportunity for more firefighters to stay employed with the City of South Bend for a longer period of time. The only difference in rank st would be the firefighter 1 class, who would receive a 2% increase effective January 1, 2009. All of the other monetary fringe benefits that are currently in this year’s ordinance would remain frozen at their current rates. The key objective of the fire union was to implement a program which was in effective for almost all of the nineteen other second class cities in the State of Indiana, but is not currently in place for the South Bend Fire Department and that was a longevity program. They discussed this for many, many sessions and again as she eluded to in the joint committee meeting they did have a longevity program back in the 60’s and 70’s which was terminated due to financial situations where the engineer rank only had a longevity amount in it. They are proposing as part of the ordinance this evening to begin again a modest longevity program which would start in the fifth year of continuous service as a sworn member of the South Bend Fire Department. Again, under the leadership of Ken Marks and Todd Skwarcan, the President and Vice-President, respectively of the Fire Union #362, they have also made the commitment to continue to work with the City Administration as well as the Common Council with regard to new ordinances. One of the ordinances is projected preliminarily to bring in perhaps and additional $100,000.00 in its first year. They have set up a meeting with the City Controller for Wednesday of this week to begin those discussion and again the Union will be involved and the Health and Public Safety Committee and also Council Member LaFountain’s committee Personnel & Finance will be working diligently to make sure that they are looking all additional areas of potential revenue. Councilmember Dieter asked for more information on the ordinance that would generate $100,000 additional revenue. Ms. Cekanski-Farrand stated that would be for fire inspections. Again, in the preliminary research they have found over a dozen Indiana communities that do charge as part of the licensing for in many instances for example the scrap/junkyard/metal ordinance they will be acting upon a Resolution later this evening that requires inspections of the fire department to make sure that there is property ingress/egress. Those services now are not being compensated for the fees that are being charge currently. So, that is just one example. Councilmember Oliver Davis stated that as a member of the negotiating team they recognized that the numbers are not as tight as they would like for them to be. But neither based upon working with the teams this summer they did not go into that hap- hazard nor was it voted on that way either. He stated that they worked together with both the Police and Fire Unions to say that they don’t know all the numbers so therefore we are going to take this on a one year basis. Instead of doing two, three or four years out and get the City caught up in that and do it on a one year basis, if they had not done that 10