When the Jamestown City Council voted in favor of a new contract with the Kendall Club Police Benevolent Association, it was safe to say that binding arbitration was the proverbial elephant in the room.

For some council members – including councilmen Mike Taylor, D-Ward 3, and Tony Dolce, R-Ward 2 – a ”yes” vote on the contract, which included a controversial 3 percent salary increase on wages police officers earned last year and another 3 percent on wages they will earn this year, was the lesser of two evils in a situation where an agreement reached through arbitration would almost certainly have forced the city to come up with larger salary increases.

But other council members – most notably City Councilman Vince DeJoy, D-Ward 4 and chairman of the city’s Finance Committee – didn’t like that idea.

”The current system of binding arbitration that we have to live within in New York state is broken and in disrepair,” DeJoy said. ”It needs a serious overhaul or even better to be scrapped. The needed change will not come by wringing our hands and throwing in the towel without a fight for what is right. Our public servants deserve certain protections, but this current system is not fair to the taxpayers that ultimately pay the salaries, and have to make great sacrifices during these times of economic crisis and uncertainty.”

THE THREAT OF ARBITRATION

Because state law doesn’t allow police officers and firefighters to go on strike, there is a provision for binding arbitration through the Public Employee Relations Board. If negotiations break down, a mediator is appointed to attempt to settle the dispute. If the mediator is unsuccessful, however, a three-member panel – with one person appointed by the municipality, one person appointed by the union and a neutral third person – reviews the initial proposals and a series of legal briefs made by each side before deciding the contract.

Good government groups, such as The Empire Center for Public Policy and www.stopthetaxshift.org, say the state should change the way compulsory arbitration works by having the panels pay more attention to the municipality’s ability to pay, prohibit consideration of anything other than wages and adopt either side’s final offer, rather than being able to make any award the panel deems appropriate.

”Employers have settled on terms they would otherwise find unacceptable out of fear that an arbitrator would award an even worse result,” wrote Terry O’Neil and E.J. McMahon in an October 17, 2007, Empire Center for Public Policy paper. ”Affluent communities, in particular, have less difficulty settling for what seems to be the going rate in arbitration awards to police and fire unions – even is this rate is somewhat inflated by the fear of arbitration. This ignited a vicious cycle: since arbitrators often attached insufficient importance to a community’s ability to pay higher salaries, poorer municipalities suffered from the ripple effect of generous precedents set by richer areas.”

WHAT THE THREAT MEANS LOCALLY

While neither side gets everything they want during arbitration, arbitration panels involved in settling disputes with the Kendall Club and Jamestown International Association of Firefighters Local 1775 took many decisions out of the hands of elected officials.

There is no minimum manning contract clause stipulating the number of police officers and firefighters the city must employ, for example, but impact arbitration awards in 2001 and 2002 stipulate the city pay additional money to union members when there are fewer than 55 working firefighters or police officers.

And, a 2001 arbitration decision involving the Jamestown Police Department was used in a 2003 decision for Jamestown firefighters that imposed a 4 percent retroactive pay raise and a 3.2 percent pay raise for 2001 and 2002 when the union was asking for 5 percent both years, compared to 4 percent and 3.2 percent offers from the city. That decision also included a $50 increase for each step in the career progression for firefighters to bring it more in line with the existing police union contract.

Those awards were based on the city’s financial condition in 2001, when city officials were working to build a surplus. With a $1.78 million fund balance, it’s unlikely an arbitrator would have said the city doesn’t have the ability to pay for yearly pay raises.

It’s one reason why Mike Taylor, D-Ward 3 and Public Safety Committee chairman, voted in favor of the contract on Monday.

”If we’re looking at what’s fiscally responsible, if this vote were to fail, we’d take the money already budgeted for these increases and go through some sort of arbitration and draw this thing out. And we’d probably end up with something that would cost the taxpayers more in the future,” Taylor said.

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