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2006 OUTLOOK FOR NEGOTIATIONS ORDER
A COPY TODAY (it is free) (click on the Link above)
Total cost of police contract is more than $2
million The
contract called for a total of 4 percent in raises to be paid dating back to
July 2003, which cost $1,397,000. That money had been set aside by the City
Council and is included in this year's budget. The
contract also called for a 2 percent raise to be implemented starting Jan. 1
of this year. The contract ends on June 30. However, the contract also called
for police to be given a raise of at least 2 percent on July 2, with the
possibility of as much as 4 percent, even though the contract will have
expired. Those two pieces cost $675,691 and will be part of next year's
budget. The
idea of agreeing to grant a raise to police outside of the contract,
according to Mayor Scott W. Lang, was to give police a 2 percent raise in
July while a new contract is being negotiated. The
previous administration had attempted to negotiate two contracts, one for
three years that took care of the back pay issues and another for two years,
going forward. The union balked at negotiating five years worth of contracts
at once. Mayor
Lang also is planning to address the issue of health care for police officers
without completing the negotiations with firefighters, who have been without
a contract for three years, and the teachers union, whose contract expired
six months ago. As
part of the police contract, the union agreed to drop Blue Cross Blue Shield
Master Medical from the wording of the contract, and replace it with the
broader "health insurance." The move allows Mayor Lang to issue a
request for proposals from other health care providers besides Blue Cross
Blue Shield, and provide options that would encourage police officers away
from the expensive Master Medical package. The
firefighter and teacher contracts still have the Master Medical clause. Mayor
Lang said he will proceed with his plan to offer more plans to the police
officers only, and continue negotiations with firefighters and teachers. The
municipal employees union, which has a contract valid through to June, has
dropped the Master Medical provision. The
city has been struggling with the ever-escalating cost of its health care
coverage for employees. When it was locked into offering only Blue Cross Blue
Shield plans, which includes Master Medical, the city's health care costs
jumped by as much as 30 percent in one year. Seven
years ago, New Bedford spent $13 million to insure its city and school
employees; this year, the city is projected to spend $32 million. Former
City Solicitor Matthew J. Thomas told the City Council last year that at that
rate, in six years, all the money raised by property taxes would go toward
paying health insurance for city and school employees. Cops’ best friend Portland police have the best health benefits of
any group of city employees. They, with firefighters, have the most generous
disability and pension agreements. If they shoot and kill someone, they get a
lawyer, for free, and are not required to give statements to detectives
investigating the case. And it is next to impossible to fire one of them
except in the most obvious or egregious cases. For
much of that, they can say, “Thank you, Robert King.” But
the largest challenges for their union president lay in the immediate future.
King, head of the Portland Police Association, the union that represents
officers and sergeants, is under the gun to deliver for his 900 members on a
range of issues no previous president has had to face all at once. The
police contract ends June 30, and negotiations for a new one have not yet
begun. The City Council has it in mind to drastically alter the Fire and
Police Disability and Retirement Fund. Health benefits are back on the table.
The city’s Independent Police Review Division, which King opposed at its
creation in 2001, today has access to all Police Bureau records. Outside
scrutiny of Police Bureau policies on deadly force and the creation of review
boards for police performance and officers’ use of force means greater public
transparency and fewer shadows in which police can take refuge. And
at the same time that King won re-election as union president in October, his
steady, like-minded secretary-treasurer, officer Leo Painton,
was ousted in favor of Sgt. Mitch Copp. Copp showed himself last week to be more volatile by
firing off a combative letter to East Precinct cops about an officer’s
transfer. “This
is one of those critical moments for the police union,” city Commissioner
Erik Sten said. “Their ability to remain a strong
and influential union goes either way up or way down in the next couple of
months. They might get into some battles they might not win, or if they do
win, they might lose long-term. They have to be very careful.” With
his easy re-election, it seems any question about whether Portland cops feel
King is the right person for this job would be out of place. He won his
members the health benefits in arbitration, was among those pushing city
Commissioner Dan Saltzman to pull a proposal to
change the disability and pension system from the May ballot and has gotten
more protections for officers involved in shootings for 15 years, since he
was a young officer. Just
last week, he helped win an arbitrator’s ruling that faulted the city’s
suspension without pay of officer Scott McCollister,
who shot and killed Kendra James in 2003 during a traffic stop. The
arbitrator ruled that McCollister should receive
five-and-a-half months’ back pay —the length of his suspension —with interest
and that the suspension be expunged from McCollister’s
record. King,
41, holds the Police Bureau rank of detective — yet because of his police
union duties, he has not worked the streets since his election five years
ago. And it is because he is a different kind of president — less public
drama, no storm-and-struggle anti-management thunder, a more deft political
mind than that of many who came before him — that there is a deep curiosity
in the city bureaucracy, the Police Bureau and among observers about just how
much King can pull off. Witnesses
said Peters, who led the union from 1974 until his retirement in 1991, did
indeed slam his gun on the bargaining table in a small, unventilated,
low-ceilinged, top-floor City Hall room that since has been remodeled out of
existence. It was the late 1980s and contract bargaining was done eye to eye,
with each side tossing out a list of demands and whittling the lists into
something both sides could choke down. “I
was there when he did it,” said Roger Morse, a former Portland Police
Association president and longtime union official. “But things don’t work
that way anymore.” A
change in the bargaining rules is one reason — collaborative bargaining
allows more people into the process. But the personalities on the other side
of the table are another reason entirely. Indeed,
Police Chief Derrick Foxworth said he would be
loath to let someone known for such behavior even in the room. “Actions
like that would drive a wedge between myself and the
PPA,” Foxworth said.
“With Robert it’s never personal. He’s a very principled person. He has a
deep respect for the process and my role in it as well as his own role. When
he makes an argument, he’s not trying to do something for show.” “You
can never make all your members happy,” he said. “There’s somebody out there
who feels screwed and who is upset at something you said or did every single
day.” And
still, even Dan Handelman, co-founder of the
citizen-watchdog group Portland Copwatch, has few
harsh words about King. “There’ve
been a lot worse in that job, that’s for sure,” Handelman
said. “Some of what I object to about backing up officers after questionable
shootings before all the facts are out — that’s just the job.” One
way King navigates through adversarial interests is to choose his fights
carefully. While
he defended McCollister to the hilt, feeling that
the officer did not violate training, procedure or policy when he shot and
killed James in 2003, he said he did not object when Foxworth
proposed firing officer Fred White, who kicked a kneeling, handcuffed suspect
in the head, then filed a report saying the suspect “swung his head into my
foot.” Two officers on the scene reported White to their supervisor. The city
settled with the suspect for $17,000. “You
always have to remember, though, that his position is an advocate’s
position,” said Denise Stone, a former vice-chairwoman of the Citizens Review
Committee, the community-involvement arm of the city’s Independent Review
Division. “He makes his arguments always from the perspective of the officer
and to benefit the officer. Always.” And
within police ranks there remains some uneasiness about what comes next and
about Mayor Tom Potter, a former Portland police chief. “Potter
leads by committee, y’know? He has a blue-ribbon
panel to study community input surveys,” Simpson said. “In our contract,
which is up sooner than I’d like to think about, we should already be
negotiating.” There
was no Northeast Precinct in 1990. North Precinct was thought of as a crack-choked,
gang-marred area that stretched roughly from the Willamette River in St.
Johns, south to Interstate 84 and east past Portland International Airport. The
cops on the afternoon shift at North Precinct — such as Mike Stradley, Wayne Svilar and Dominick
Jacobellis, names that have almost a cult following
within the Police Bureau — liked to “run and gun,” King said. He
was one of them. They
liked the fast pace and the fast experience and the latitude their
supervisors gave them to bring down bad guys. They thought of themselves as
drawing a hard line against crime even as they took pains to understand the
culture it came from, King said. But
longtime colleagues don’t see the differences between the run-and-gun officer
and the diplomatic union president. “Same
bad haircut, same everything,” Detective Dan McGetrick,
who knew King at North Precinct in those days, said with a laugh. “He’s the
exact same guy. I look at Robert and I don’t say: ‘There’s a politician.’ …
That word does not describe Robert. He’s too honest.” But
while he may not seem the traditional politician, King knows political
marketing: He seems to know which parts of himself to sell to close a deal. Fewer
than three months before King was elected union president in 2000, then-Chief
Mark Kroeker’s new dress code took effect, banning
facial hair, jewelry and, for men, hair below the collar. King had long worn
a bracelet in honor of a fallen Oregon State Police trooper and wanted to
continue wearing it on the job. Kroeker said no,
and King left it at home without protest. When
King ran for union president against officer Tom Mack in 2000, part of his
campaign was to place emphasis on a macabre part of his police experience:
that he had killed two people — one as a rookie patrol officer in December
1991 after an 18-year-old suspect in a traffic stop stabbed him in the left
shoulder and the other, a 65-year-old suicidal man who bled to death from a
leg wound King inflicted with a rifle shot as a sniper on the Special
Emergency Reaction Team in September 1997. He stressed his leadership of the
Employee Assistance Plan, which links cops to rehabilitation programs or
counseling. He
won by a greater than 2-to-1 margin, 567 votes to 217. And
after taking office, for three consecutive years he attended a
union-leadership seminar at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Then last
year, he spent most of the summer in Germany on the dime of the German
Marshall Fund of the United States learning more about public policy and
union negotiations. These are not credentials he flaunts to his members at
roll calls but wields with others on their behalf. The
union is run by one or two office workers, a small budget and the hours the
president and secretary treasurer — the only full-time union leadership positions
— put in. Each gets a stipend to augment their Police Bureau salaries, which
for King and Copp are around $73,000 a year. King
grew up in Northeast Portland, in the Rose City neighborhood not far from
Madison High School, and went to Central Catholic High School, then Portland
State University. He is half-Hispanic — his mother is Mexican. His father was
a longshoreman, and his brother became one as well. When it was time for King
to apply, there were no open jobs on the docks, and he turned to law
enforcement. “It
left an impression,” King said. Not
that he knew he was destined for a union presidency — not at age 6. But he
said he knew these were people worth protecting. He
joined the Lake Oswego Police Department in 1987, jumping to Portland three
years later. Barely
two months after he passed his probation period as a Portland patrol officer,
on Dec. 15, 1991, King saw a car weaving down North Interstate Avenue a
little after 10 p.m. King
pulled the car over near Skidmore Street. Three men were inside. He
drew and reholstered his 9 mm Glock
handgun to control one of the men inside before putting him in handcuffs. As
he walked the suspect back to his patrol car, another man got out and started
toward King, one arm raised. King
dropped the handcuffed suspect to the ground and struggled to draw his gun. “I
had this winter coat on, and I just could not pull my weapon out. … Finally I
pulled so hard I tore the strap on the holster and by then the guy was right
on top of me,” King said. “I
don’t know how many times I fired. I don’t remember looking through the sight
on the gun, I just know I kept firing until he fell
down.” Only
after George hit the ground did King find the blood on his left arm from the
stab wound George had given him with a knife King never saw until George was
dead. But
that’s only half the story. Portland
police assign homicide detectives to every fatal officer-involved shooting
and send their findings to the Multnomah County district attorney’s office
for review by a grand jury. Detectives wanted King to give his statement of
events right there on the scene. “I
said, ‘Uh, guys, don’t I get a lawyer? Do I have to talk to you now? Is this
really the best time? Just let me calm down and I’ll give you whatever you
want,’ ” King said. King
refused to cooperate with detectives or the district attorney’s office until
he had consulted a lawyer, a rare thing at the time, now the standard
procedure. Officers who fire fatal shots are now routinely interviewed within
24 hours of the shooting, but always with a lawyer and union representative
present. Again
last year, when the Los Angeles-based Police Assessment Resource Center,
invited to examine police procedures after the James shooting, urged the
Police Bureau again to force officers to cooperate in such investigations,
King and Foxworth agreed that such a requirement
would jeopardize any potential prosecution by denying officers their Fifth
Amendment right against self-incrimination. The
Independent Police Review Division, which is overseen by the city auditor’s
office, was proposed before King became union president, though he publicly
opposed it and argued that police could and should hold themselves
accountable. But
after becoming president, and as the creation of the new review agency became
inevitable, he cut out the rhetoric and asked for a place at the table to
discuss how best to build it. One
of the critical differences between the review division and its predecessor,
the Police Internal Investigations Auditing Committee, was that the burden of
proof grew to successfully challenge the Police Bureau’s handling of a
complaint. Instead of a preponderance of the evidence showing that the Police
Bureau handled it incorrectly, the standard became a nebulous one of whether
a reasonable person might disagree with the Police Bureau’s action. “It’s
the toughest job I ever did,” Morse, the former union president, said of
King’s position. “You work 75, 80 hours a week and there are so many things
to deal with. You can get a lot of access and a lot of attention and you can
do a lot of good in that job. The only thing you can’t do is fail.” Deputies, county
staff at growling stage of talks
Bexar County sheriff’s deputy
contract negotiations have become so sticky with accusations, election
politics and behind-the-scenes meetings that commissioners will promise to
say they will leave talks with union members to the bargaining team until
they get a contract. “We’re going to meet with you, and
you only, and only at the bargaining table,” said Lowell Denton, the county’s
negotiating lawyer, describing the letter he will draft to union members. A contract will take some doing to
make a March 17 deadline, since the county’s team just presented the union’s
first, hefty requests to the Commissioners Court, and the union team is
declining to meet them. As Tuesday’s meeting began, members
of the Deputy Sheriffs Association of Bexar County held a news conference
outside, demanding “face-to-face” meetings with commissioners. The beef for the union, dominated by
detention officers, was the same reason they left a Jan. 13 bargaining
session. A rival union, commonly known as LEO and made up mostly of law
enforcement officers, asked commissioners court for a raise. They’ve also met
with some individual commissioners. The Deputy Sheriffs Association wants
the same access as LEO, said David Van Os, the association’s negotiating
lawyer. LEO President Ernest Orgovan said, “We’re not doing anything they didn’t do.” Indeed, despite the process that
began last year with teams of specialized contract lawyers and staff, a lot
of talk has left the assigned experts out. Association President Avery Walker
said one of the commissioners told him that he hadn’t seen the union’s
proposals. Inside, staff was giving a summary of
the proposals, with question marks where they couldn’t get union
clarification, to commissioners. “One of the lessons from previous
local entities was to make sure officials were fully informed of the costs,”
Budget Officer David Smith said, referring to 1988 police union negotiations
when the City Council promised far more than some realized. The cost, $176 million over three
years, would force commissioners to raise taxes to pay for a 21 percent
overall operating budget increase, and would almost double the cost of
housing jail inmates, Smith said. The numbers gave Commissioner Lyle
Larson, the court’s sole Republican, a chance to rail against unions, citing
costly situations in California. “Were they sober when they presented
these numbers?” Larson asked, and proposed that the county go straight to
arbitration and privatize the jail. Another lesson from the 1988 police
union contract might have been that it got complicated when politics made an
end run around formal negotiations. It has gotten complicated again. The association has declared war on
Precinct 2 Commissioner Paul Elizondo, supporting
former City Councilman Enrique Barrera, who opposes Elizondo
in the March primary. Elizondo has a history of backing unions and deputies, but his close LEO
ties have earned him the enmity of the rival association. It’s not wise to make an enemy of
someone who has a voice on the court, he said. “At the end of this, win or lose, me,
I’m still going to be here when they bring their contract in October,” Elizondo said, adding that he would still “do right by
their families.” He acknowledged meeting with LEO
members, but only after association members began meeting with Commissioners
Tommy Adkisson and Sergio “Chico” Rodriguez, as
well as County Judge Nelson Wolff. Adkisson said he met both groups, and Wolff said he was buttonholed in
the hall by union members. But Rodriguez said he hadn’t met with
anybody. “They’ve come in here to drop off
information, but I haven’t met with anyone directly,” he said. Elkton
ratifies police union contract Elkton’s elected officials Wednesday night formally ratified
their first legally binding labor contract with the union that now represents
all 28 sworn officers in the town police department. |
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