- I REPORT, YOU DECIDE. By Barry Levinson
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BARRY LEVINSON
This is my first opportunity to compare an excellent law, the CostaMesa Ordinance on Civic Openness in Negotiations (C.O.I.N.) vs. theFullerton Draft C.O.I.N Ordinance, which can be passed into law by avote of our city council on Tuesday, June 17th 2014.
Costa Mesa’s Civic Openness in Negotiations ordinance was
designed to make public employee salary and benefit negotiations
open and transparent to the public and to all members of the city
council as well.
First, the Costa Mesa ordinance makes it clear that “the city shall
have prepared on its behalf, by an independent auditor, …. a
study and supplemental data upon which the study is based,
determining the fiscal impacts attributed to each term and condition of
employment.”
More importantly “the above report and findings of the independent
auditor shall be completed and made available for review by the city
council and the public at least thirty days before consideration by the
city council of an initial meet and confer proposal to be presented
to any recognized employee organization regarding negotiation
of an amended, extended, successor, or original memorandum of
understanding.”
Finally, “the above report shall be regularly updated by the
independent auditor to itemize the costs and the funded and
unfunded actuarial liability which would or may result form adoption or
acceptance of each meet and confer proposal.”
The draft Fullerton C.O.I.N. ordinance includes none of the above
specific steps to ensure the public is being kept informed with
accurate and timely data and information.
What does our draft ordinance include? It includes the following:
“Staff shall prepare an annual analysis of cost and liabilities related to
each Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between a recognized
employee association and the city of Fullerton …”. “The annual fiscal
analysis shall be submitted to the City’s independent auditor during
the course of the annual City financial audit.”
Please notice ladies and gentlemen that this audit takes place
annually, probably after the conclusion and the signing of the labor
agreements. Learning of an error after a 3 or 5-year agreement has
been signed, sealed and delivered is meaningless. How convenient
for all city employees that City Manager Joe Felz and staff would
rewrite this ordinance in this fashion. The auditing required under
the Fullerton Draft Ordinance is a waste of money because it is not
completed on a timely basis.
Second, the Fullerton draft excludes the Report Format, which
provides the framework and necessary detail to understand the
impacts of various items in the proposals.
Third, if the two items above do not derail the true purpose of
C.O.I.N. then a simple majority of the council can do away with the
requirement to have an independent negotiator. This part of the draft
ordinance is ridiculous on its face. You take a cornerstone of the
concept of C.O.I.N. and you make it optional with the vote of 3 out of
5 members of the council. Section B.1 entitled Principal Negotiator,
states “The requirement for an outside negotiator may be waived by a
majority vote of City Council.”
Fullerton city leaders have taken an open, fair and effective law for all
parties and made it into a paper tiger.
This is my first review of the Fullerton C.O.I.N. draft ordinance and
you can see by the length of this critique that the two ordinances
have far more differences than key points in common. In fact, I would
be hard pressed to see any of the Costa Mesa key points being
brought forward to our Fullerton ordinance. Based on all the above
facts, it would not be far from the truth to state that our Fullerton
ordinance literally guts the effectiveness of the Costa Mesa law.
My recommendation is that we throw out this draft in its entirety. We
start again with the Costa Mesa Ordinance as our draft ordinance as
originally brought before this council some 7 months ago by Council
member Whitaker. If any council members want to change any of
the Costa Mesa requirements they should have documented valid
reasons why their change would be for the better and each change
should be voted on separately by our council.
In my humble opinion, the Costa Mesa Civic Openness in
Negotiations Ordinance is an excellent law. The only fault that some
may find with it (certainly not me) is that it will actually accomplish its
proclaimed purpose.—BARRY LEVINSON
#1 by Rudy on June 17, 2014 - 1:17 pm
Looks like we have a bit of a controversy on our hands as there there is another side to this coin deal.
http://fullertontaxpayers.org/2014/06/flip-a-coin/
#2 by horrible strategy on June 17, 2014 - 4:56 pm
Do I understand Mr. Paden correctly?
Approving something, only to have to walk it back after November is a horrible strategy.
#3 by Say What? on June 18, 2014 - 8:54 pm
Thanks Rudy. Here is Sean Paden from his post on fullertontaxpayers.org
“In my last article, I discussed the importance of the Civic Openness in Negotiations Act (the “COIN Act”), an ordinance which would remove the secrecy involved in labor negotiations – secrecy that gives the City’s public employee unions undue leverage in agitating for ever greater pay and benefits. Since then, we have good news and bad news.
First the good news: the City Council has taken up the Coin Act, sort of. However, that’s also the bad news, because the Council is considering, and appears to be leaning towards implementing, changes to the COIN Act that would eliminate the most important benefits of the act. The vote will occur at the next Council meeting tomorrow night, June 17.
The first warning sign was probably the fact that the agenda forecast didn’t even mention the COIN Act at all, but referred generically to “Labor Negotiation Ordinance” — with no mention of COIN specifically, which is why it did not appear that the Council was even going to take up the COIN Act in the month of May, as originally promised. However, given the proposed changes, this would at least have been more honest, since the proposed revisions considered by the Council during the May 20 meeting undermine many of the tenets of COIN in the first place.
One of the changes proposed by the new and “improved” version of COIN is that negotiators are only selected if there are “significant changes” to the wages, hours or benefits. This was included to mollify concerns that the COIN act would cover minor, trivial revisions to employment contracts but, as drafted, leaves the door open for abuse. For example, COIN would not be triggered if the change in pay and benefits is less than ½ of one percent of total base salary, and would not be triggered if a Memorandum of Understanding of 12 months or less was agreed to. This revision could prove to be uneventful, but it is not difficult to see how these rules could be exploited (by entering into successive 3 month MOUs, for example, all of which kept changes in pay and benefits under the 3 month threshold), and there is nothing in the proposed ordinance that would prevent this.
More egregious is that the Staff has included a provision that requires the City Council designate “Executive or Management level employees” to “assist” the outside, independent labor negotiator in their negotiations. This provision guts the entire purpose of having an independent negotiator, as it sends a very clear signal to our negotiator that their “assistants” – who stand to benefit from the results of labor negotiations – speak with the authority of the council itself.
In addition, the proposed version of COIN on May 20 revised the ordinance to only allow the City Council to report the “details” of rejected offers. During the Council meeting, staff indicated their preference of reporting only a memo summarizing the offer, rather than the written offer itself. It appears that this provision has been changed to require the City Council to report “notification of written offers rejected”, but I honestly can’t tell if this is better or worse. A revision requiring the Council to make the written offers themselves available would be a superior alternative.
And as a final payout to our biggest public employee union, the Fullerton COIN Ordinance will not apply to any labor negotiations “for which exchange of initial written proposals” occurred prior to August 15, 2014. This means the ongoing labor negotiations with the Fullerton Police Department, which represents close to half of the budget for the entire City, will not be affected by this Ordinance.
To be sure, the proposed Fullerton COIN Act does represent an improvement in the current process of negotiating pay and benefits for public employees. However, the revisions made at the behest of our current Council majority (Bruce Whitaker and Greg Sebourn exempted) almost uniformly undermine the intent of the COIN Act which, let us not forget, stood for Openness and Transparency in the negotiation process. In order to implement true openness and transparency, it will be necessary to have our voices heard at the ballot box this November, so we can revisit this ordinance in the future.”