Saturday, November 21, 2009

Have You Looked at the City of Kingston Firefighters' Contract Lately?

I am 100% behind Mayor Sottile's lawsuit against the Kingston Firefighters Union.  The lawsuit attempts to block the union from grieving Sottile's refusal to hire new firemen to replace those firefighters who took the recent retirement buyout.  There is one problem.  The firefighters' contract clearly states that manpower is to be replaced within 60 days of a vacancy or before the next training class.  In addition, the firefighters' contract says there shall be no layoffs...............This contract was obviously negotiated during better economic times.  However, I believe that if the starting negotiating positions of the mayor and the union were public knowledge and if the Common Council had more say in the negotiations at the time 2 years ago, these pro-union clauses of 1) mandatory replacement of retirees and 2) No Layoffs would not have been in this contract....... Let's do better next time for the taxpayers.  The only way we will be able to correct this problem in the short term is to encourage the union to open the contract, which is unlikely.  The sure way to correct this problem in the short term is Municipal Bankruptcy which would automatically cancel all of our Kingston union contracts.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sounds to me like the City is wasting money with their lawsuit - its pretty clear in the contract. Wait until it end and negotiate it out.

Ralph Mitchell said...

To 12:17PM,
Your comment is correct. However, my point is that all too often we taxpayers and council people are kept in the dark when the police, fire, dpw, and especially teacher contracts are being negotiated. If we are kept in the dark, there is nothing we can do except whine and pay the tax bill after all of damage is done in the signed contracts which "GIVE AWAY THE STORE". We taxpayers need to DEMAND THE CONTRACT TERMS GOING INTO NEGOTIATIONS so we can voice our opinions about our inability to pay worker salary increases via increased taxes.

Anonymous said...

You can't have every citizen negotiate a contract - that why there are elected officials.

Anonymous said...

I don't know if you have access to it but I was told the DPW contract states that even if the city goes to a private hauler that there can not be layoffs as a result. Is that true?

Ralph Mitchell said...

To 5:39PM,
I do not know about the DPW contract. I will try to check out this question next week.

Anonymous said...

The Mayor needs to read the contracts he signed after and before he signs them and not negoitate them during campaign season with fireman helping his campaign.