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Council's Union Concessions Dig Crater In City Budget

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The Tampa Tribune

Published: December 22, 2008

If current projections hold, the city of Tampa will be $35 million in the hole by 2010. Major cuts in service and personnel will be inevitable.

You can thank City Council. Its willingness to go along with unreasonable union demands set the city on a course heading straight toward a fiscal shipwreck.
Personnel costs - wages, benefits, pension and such - account for about 70 percent of the city's expenses. And because of exceptionally generous contracts the city has awarded the unions, those costs are exploding - as revenues shrink from diminished property values. Yet - outrageously - the unions are demanding even more, though the city's police and firefighters are already well paid.

Last August, the city gave the politically influential firefighters union a contract that gave workers not at the top of their grade a 9.5 percent annual raise. Even those already at the top of their grade received an average 4 percent raise. And council went along with firefighters' demands that emergency medical technicians receive a $30 biweekly bonus, though the training is required of all firefighters. City budget officials say all this made the pay raise package about 12.9 percent.

Such fat contracts are hardly unusual. Virtually every year council largely goes along with what the firefighters, police and city worker unions demand.

And what they demand is well above what is given in the private sector. It is not unusual for the city to give annual raises to union workers of 9 or 10 percent.

Mayor Pam Iorio, to her credit, has tried to hold the line on union wages, but she has had a hand in the ballooning personnel costs. She supported provisions that increased pension benefits. She says city workers deserve a decent retirement.

But consider the financial vise the city is in. As lower property values reduce revenues, personnel costs would inflate from about $261 million in 2009 to more than $300 million by 2011. And pension costs are likely to increase from $14 million to $21 million by next fiscal year and more than $25 million the following year.

Still, as people throughout the city lose their jobs and face foreclosures, the firefighters' union wants another extraordinary package, an average 8.5 raise per year, not including the continued bonus it wants for medical technicians and paramedics.

And it wants the contract to be extended for three years.

Iorio has countered with a 3 percent annual raise, which would be considered generous at most work places.

She also rightly wants to limit the contract to one year, to allow the city to better respond to the difficult economic times.

But don't expect any concessions from the me-first union crowd, which can be counted on to cram the council chambers with family members and insist they shouldn't be bound by the economic realities affecting other families since they are willing to risk their lives on the job.

Last August, when council caved in to firefighters' demands, members said the public supported its public safety unions and didn't object to the raises.

But sooner or later, residents who are struggling with their household budgets and tax bills will begin to realize the city is picking their pockets to score political points with a union that has an insatiable appetite. And they are not going to be happy.

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