RI General Assembly Passes Firefighter OT Bill

PROVIDENCE, RI—Rhode Island's public employee unions again scored victory after victory at the State House on Thursday.

In a series of final votes, the General Assembly approved bills to mandate time-and-a-half pay to firefighters who average more than 42 hours a week and to lock in the wages and benefits in expired teacher and municipal public employee contracts until a new contract is in place.

Next stop: the desk of Governor Raimondo who, after meeting Wednesday with a delegation of mayors vehemently opposed to both bills, told reporters: "I haven't made any decision either way."

Hours away from final votes at the Rhode Island State House, mayors and business leaders stepped up their campaign to convince an undecided Governor Raimondo to veto the package.

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In the last 24 hours, there have been these developments:

The Rhode Island League of Cities and Towns fired off a letter to Raimondo, taking issue with the way she characterized the mayors' stance after meeting with them on Wednesday.

While Raimondo told reporters afterwards that the mayors had raised legitimate concerns, she also said: "They did acknowledge that this bill — the evergreen bill — is better than and different from the bill I vetoed last time. They were pleased about that."

Echoing the arguments raised by the public-employee unions promoting the legislation, she also said, "This bill is more narrowly tailored than the last one...It is restricted to just wages and benefits ... and they do acknowledge that if the old contract stays in place, wages stay flat, so there is an incentive for the unions to come to the table to negotiate because they want a raise."

Brian Daniels, the executive director of the RI League of Cities and Towns, had this response, in the letter he delivered to Raimondo's office, while she was headed to New York to receive "the National Mother's Day Committee's "Outstanding Mother of the Year" award, a Democratic Governors Association event and undisclosed "economic and business development meetings."

"First, our members are clear that the current legislation in no way represents an improvement over the version you vetoed in 2017," Daniels wrote. "Nothing stated in yesterday's meeting should be interpreted in that way."

As he noted, the key language remains: "All terms and conditions in the collective bargaining agreement shall remain in effect."

"In other words, a city or town would be forced to honor all previous contract terms for as much as a year or longer, spend tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars on legal fees for mediation and arbitration, and still lack leverage at the end of the process to gain concessions on wages and benefits. While the wording of the legislation makes a gesture towards satisfying your stated desire for a 'different' bill, there is no substantive difference,'' he wrote the governor.

"Second, as you heard from several members, there is no dispute that personnel costs will increase during the contract continuation period even if wages remain flat,'' he wrote.

"Rising health care costs and increasing pension and retiree health plan contributions will mean higher personnel spending even if wages are flat. If employees do not come to the table to increase cost-sharing or reduce benefits, the taxpayer will bear that growing burden during the contract continuation period."

There has been no response yet from the governor's office to the letters. Raimondo told reporters on Wednesday, after meeting with the mayors, that she has not yet decided whether to sign, veto or allow the bills to become law without her signature.

A day earlier, a group calling itself the RI Business Coalition urged a veto for exactly the reasons Raimondo stated when she vetoed an earlier version of the "evergreen'' contract bill in 2017.

Quoting Raimondo's veto message word-for-word, the business leaders wrote: "Never-ending contracts [...] will lead to higher costs to taxpayers, as they would make it more difficult for municipal leaders to deal with changing economic circumstances, rising costs or large deficits, and employees would have no incentive to renegotiate a contract if they expected significant concessions on wages, health care or working conditions."

"Nothing has changed since then,'' they wrote.

"Like the legislation you vetoed in 2017, the contract continuance proposals would severely undermine the ability of municipalities to modify their cost structures, especially given that personnel costs make up the bulk of municipal budgets. If these bills were to become law, a substantial portion of municipal budgets would be controlled not only by the arbitration process, but also held up by contract continuance without any modifications, regardless of the fiscal needs or conditions in the community.

On the proposed 42-hour overtime mandate for firefighters, they wrote: "It is also significant that Rhode Island already spends more on fire protection than any other state...In fact, at $228 per capita, the Ocean State spent twice as much as the national average of $114 on these expenditures." (Lobbyists for the firefighters dispute the findings for 2016 reflected in a Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council report.)

The letter was signed by the executive directors of the Newport County Chamber of Commerce ( Erin Donovan-Boyle), the Northern Rhode Island Chamber of Commerce (John C. Gregory) and the Southern Rhode Island Chamber of Commerce (Elizabeth Berman), Philip Tedesco, president/CEO Rhode Island Association of REALTORS; Melissa Travis, president of the Rhode Island Society of Certified Public Accountants; and Gary Ezovski and Grafton "Cap" Willey of the Rhode Island Small Business Economic Summit.

Meanwhile, a newly erupted contract war in Warwick is providing a real-life illustration of the potential consequences of locking in the terms of expired labor agreements.

The city's firefighters overwhelmingly rejected a proposed new contract that, among other things, would have cut the retirement benefit available to employees hired on or after July 1, 2018 which, in turn, would help reduce the city's annual required contributions to the city pension fund. Mayor Joseph J. Solomon was counting on "pension reform'' and other concessions to save upwards of $2 million.

"Now I have to figure how I am going to go forward in addressing this financial dilemma," he told WPRO-radio on Thursday morning. "..It's going to result in decreased services...It's going to affect all citizens and all other departments of the city."

Note: the Senate-passed bill to specifically lock-in expired firefighter contracts is not in the package up for final votes Thursday.

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