The ongoing citywide debate over compensation for public safety
employees, sparked by the firefighters’ demand for a 9 percent pay
increase and costly retirement benefits, is a healthy one.
The ongoing citywide debate over compensation for public safety employees, sparked by the firefighters’ demand for a 9 percent pay increase and costly retirement benefits, is a healthy one.
It’s all about priorities, local control and pie – yes, pie, as in how big a slice of pie the firefighters and police should get. Right now, firefighters and police get a very big slice – 80 percent.
With the increased demands by firefighters, that percentage could grow. Which means that the city can’t keep up in other areas like park maintenance, sidewalk improvements, recreation programs, salaries for other city employees and needed intersection improvements.
It’s a real problem that cannot be viewed in the isolated arena of “firefighters put their lives on the line for us every day.”
Yes. We appreciate it. We admire our firefighters and our police officers for their courage and commitment. And, yes, it’s possible – God forbid – that one of them could sacrifice his life in the line of duty.
So, we salute them, we respect them, and we compensate them as well as we can.
But the reality is that Gilroy cannot continue building big box stores that produce revenue which, essentially, goes to funding salaries and benefits for firefighters and police. That’s a surefire path to a spiraling decline in city services.
And the truth is that public safety employees in Gilroy are compensated fairly. The city paid out $560,000 in overtime this year to firefighters and, when benefits were counted, every firefighter earned more than $100,000 annually.
Clearly, what needs to happen at this point is that the city must regain local control of the budget.
Gilroy voters wrestled that local control from the City Council in 1988, passing a measure that inserted binding arbitration for public safety employees only into the city charter.
Binding arbitration was sold as a means to keep the peace between public safety employees and the city. What it did was hand over local control of our community’s finances to one, non-elected official that nobody in Gilroy will ever know.
That so-called expert doesn’t have to live here, and is never held accountable for the decision that is made. The last binding arbitration decision here accounts for the lack of flexibility in the staffing of fire engines and the majority of the astronomic increase in overtime pay.
It’s time to change that. It’s time to take back local control. It’s time for the Council to put binding arbitration on the ballot. It’s time for a reality check.
