A total of 270 new police, fire, teacher and superintendent contracts were uploaded today to SeeThroughNY, the Empire Center’s transparency website.

Newly uploaded collective bargaining agreements include:

• Nassau County’s contract with the Nassau County Police Benevolent Association (PBA), originally signed in 1995, along with subsequent memoranda of agreement (MOA) and arbitration awards, are available online for the first time. The latest MOA hiked members’ pay 13.4 percent, on top of seniority raises, over a three-year period, despite the county’s grim fiscal situation.
• The City of Cortland’s contract with the Cortland Professional Fire Fighters Association, which blocks the district’s volunteers from driving any fire department vehicles unless they have completed nine firefighting courses and 100 hours of annual continuing education. By comparison, many volunteer fire departments only require commercial drivers licenses.
• The East Syracuse Minoa school district’s teachers union contract, which allows the East Syracuse Minoa United Teachers union president to spend half of his or her workday, with full pay and benefits, attending to union business. The district is only reimbursed $3,400 for that time over the course of the four-year contract.

More than 6,000 current and expired contracts are now searchable on SeeThroughNY’s contract database, the most comprehensive in the state.

The Empire Center, based in Albany, is an independent, non-partisan, not-for-profit think tank dedicated to promoting policies to make New York a better place to live, work and do business.