Reporting on Contracts - Labor Relations
High-ranking Suffolk police to get 11.25% raises over 6 years
Dec. 12, 2019 | Newsday
High-ranking Suffolk County police are set to get 11.25% raises over six years under a tentative $53 million deal reached with the Superior Officers Association, officials said Wednesday.
Sergeants, lieutenants, captains and other senior officers at top step would have base salaries ranging from $183,000 to $273,000 a year by 2024, officials said. That base pay does not include other pay benefits, such as overtime and longevity pay, which are expected to add thousands of dollars to salaries.
The deal — approved by the County Legislature’s government operations committee Wednesday — would ensure that superior officers are paid between 3.59% and 17.97% more than police officers, whom they supervise, documents show.
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Suffolk PBA overwhelmingly ratifies 6-year contract
May 20, 2019 | Newsday
Suffolk County police officers on Monday overwhelmingly ratified a new six-year contract that will raise the pay of officers with 15 years on the job to more than $200,000 a year by 2024 when overtime and benefits such as longevity are factored in.
In an online vote that ended at 5 p.m. Monday, 1,344 of the 1,623 Police Benevolent Association members—84 percent -- backed the agreement, said Noel DiGerolamo, PBA president.
An email that went out to members Friday said compounded pay increases will total more than 13 percent by the end of the contract.
The email said pay will exceed $200,000 when factors including, “top step, night differential, holiday pay, seven worked holidays, cleaning [allowance], 15 year longevity [and] 150 hours of overtime” are considered.
The add-ons will bring pay to $201,651 for officers working the 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. shift and the 4 p.m. to midnight shift, and $208,657 for those who work midnight until 8 a.m.
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Suffolk’s questionable contracts
May 19, 2019 | Ken Girardin | Empire Center
New York’s most populous suburban county has just ratified a trio of labor deals with its largest unions—and, in the process, showcased some of the worst aspects of collective bargaining across the state.
The Suffolk County Legislature on Tuesday night ratified* new contracts with the county’s Association of Municipal Employees (AME) and Police Benevolent Association (PBA), which together represent more than half of the county workforce. They also approved a healthcare cost-sharing agreement with the Suffolk County Organization of Public Employees (SCOPE), a consortium of all 11 county employee unions. The deals were negotiated outside public view by County Executive Steve Bellone—standard practice for New York public employers.
Bellone, who is running for a third term this year, issued a news release claiming the deals together “secure $40 million dollars in new health care savings and result in the lowest level of raises for Police Officers in decades.” But his office produced no details to support this claim before he sent the measure to county legislators for approval.
Lawmakers waived a county charter-required seven-day waiting period to vote on the deals before more details emerged or could be scrutinized, and approved each measure nearly unanimously.
That leaves a lot of questions yet to to be answered. For one thing, it’s hard to know just what lawmakers were agreeing to, because the AME and PBA contracts were memorandums of agreement that modified existing deals. Those contracts, however, were never filed with the state Public Employment Relations Board (PERB), as required by state regulations, nor were they posted on the county website. The PBA MOA modified a 2012 MOA, which modified terms set in a 2010 arbitration award, which were based on a 2004 contract. Unless legislators were presented with all four documents, they had no way of seeing what they were actually committing to.
The County Legislature released a single-page analysis of top-line costs for each of the three deals, without providing a cost breakdown for specific provisions.
Unlike the anticipated healthcare savings, the new costs from raises are guaranteed to materialize.
The lengths of the deals are themselves problematic. The AME contract runs through December 2024 and the PBA and SCOPE deals run through December 2025. That means the winners of the next two general elections for county legislature will already be committed to the terms.
In other news, both the PBA and AME will soon issue endorsements in upcoming races for county executive and county legislature.
*The final vote count has not yet been posted but at least 16 of the 18 legislators voted for the three measures.
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