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City Council That Won't Say No Falls Over Self To Spend Even More
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Published: August 27, 2008
Tampa City Council members congratulated themselves last week for fashioning a "compromise" in the salary dispute with the city's firefighters.
It was nothing of the sort.
Mayor Pam Iorio offered the union a 6.5 percent average raise, a generous offer in tough economic times. Even a magistrate who scrutinized the impasse said the city's offer was fair and in the public's best interest.
But the union wanted an average 10 percent increase and so brought its case to a bigger body of politicians, the city council.
All seven members caved.
Led by tax-and-spend liberals John Dingfelder and Mary Mulhern, the council gave firefighters what amounts to a 9.5 percent annual increase.
For good measure, they added a biweekly bonus of $30 for emergency medical technicians and $110 for paramedics.
Their largesse will cost taxpayers an extra $730,000 this fiscal year, and an extra $2.2 million if the contract is extended to two years.
And they call this a compromise?
No wonder property-tax statements that recently hit area homes show so little downward movement. The city's bleeding-heart council has never met a spending proposal it didn't like. The only time it has said no was when former councilman Shawn Harrison suggested a tax cut. The city had too many unmet needs, members cried at the time.
Taxpayers will be hit hard by the council's capitulation because word is out that if the mayor shows fiscal restraint in negotiations - a stance for which she will pay a political price - unions should appeal to city council, where anything goes.
Negotiations are currently under way with the Amalgamated Transit Union, which represents about 2,100 nonprofessional city workers. It wants the same 5 percent across-the-board raise given firefighters, plus merit raises that would boost overall increases to 9.5 percent for some people.
ATU wants one more thing, too. It wants take-home cars for some employees, just like the police union negotiated.
Perhaps if they pack council chambers like the firefighters did, council members might even offer chauffeurs - as a compromise, of course.
Tampa's city council has demonstrated an appalling lack of concern for the financial burden it places on taxpayers. Only Councilman Charlie Miranda seemed to understand that the city cannot afford to keep boosting salaries to unrealistic levels. But given how the others were leaning, Miranda made the vote unanimous. A protest vote would have been preferable.
Dingfelder and Mulhern fail to understand that times are tough. Residents are struggling to make ends meet. Private sector jobs are disappearing. So are tax revenues. Tampa's recurring property tax-revenues have dropped $28 million over the past two years.
Yet council shot down the mayor's attempt to kill a convoluted step-plan pay system that in addition to a merit pay increase, gives firefighters a second raise of between 1.2 percent and 19.5 percent a year based on seniority.
Know anyone in the private sector getting that kind of boost?
Council members only wanted to applaud the firefighters, as Councilman Joe Caetano did, for "working their butt off."
Taxpayers also work their butt off and are struggling to endure a devastating economic downtown. They don't have time to pack council chambers like the firefighters did. They deserved better.
Instead, council members recklessly inflated the city's financial obligations to curry favor with a union whose endorsement, as Dingfelder bluntly put it, "we love" to get "on our campaign literature."
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how government works.
To get the endorsement of a politically powerful union, Dingfelder, Mulhern and the bunch picked your pocket.
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