Warwick council to vote on new fire, police and municipal contracts

WARWICK – Three-year contracts with Warwick’s police, firefighters and municipal employees will go before the City Council for ratification at a special meeting tomorrow night. The agreements would run through the end of fiscal 2012.
City taxpayers “will not believe what Warwick Mayor Scott Avedisian is giving away in these contracts,” former city councilor Robert A. Cushman said in an e-mail today to Providence Business News.
Attached to his e-mail is a memo, dated Friday, in which city Personnel Director Oskar K. Shelton sets total savings to the city at more than $9.72 million over the term of the three contracts.
“As you know,” Shelton wrote, “the discussions we had with the unions consisted of two major elements: concessions from the unions prior to the end of this fiscal year in order for us to balance the FY 2009 budget; and a three-year collective-bargaining agreement extension through June 30, 2012, with certain concessions to help the city balance future budgets.”

But in his note today, Cushman contends that those savings are insufficient. And in a bulleted list, he charges that:
• The contracts feature “no-layoff” clauses for all three years, “for all unions.”
• The contracts ask for employee health care copays of only $14 per week for individual coverage and $28 per week ($1,456 per year) for family coverage. But the “governor is proposing a 25 percent copay” that would bring the employee cost for family coverage to $3,750 per year. “That alone would save Warwick taxpayers millions,” Cushman said.
• The contracts offer “municipal pension enhancements based on 2006 actuarial studies” that do not account for the recent market crash, he said.
• The city has listed “employee retirements that have nothing to do with these contracts as savings associated with these retirements,” Cushman said.
• The city has included “over $2 million in deferred benefits they are claiming are savings [that] are simply IOUs,” he said.
• The city would allocate money that becomes available from the federal stimulus package approved last week – the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (READ MORE) – “to unions, to restore deferred benefits,” he said.
Cushman’s note also accuses the mayor and the new council president, Bruce S. Place, of “trying to jam this through without public input.”
But Mayor Avedisian told PBN in a telephone interview that the city has “met all the requirements” for public notice of the City Council session tomorrow, which he said will be open to the public, as required under city ordinance. (The state Open Meetings Act requires 48 hours public notice for most meetings of state and local agencies.)
And, when asked to comment on Cushman’s other claims, Avedisian said the former councilor was wrong on every point. According to the mayor:
• None of the three contracts includes a “no-layoff” clause. Such a clause had been included “by accident” in a draft version of one of the contracts, Avedisian said, but that mistake was corrected before the contract was put before the union membership.
• “If the governor’s plan is approved, it would supersede” the copayments specified in the city contracts, he said.
• The “pension enhancement” of which Cushman complains will cost $174 per year, but “it was a way to get the municipal employees to give up $220,000 per year,” Avedisian said. That’s a trade he’ll make “anytime.”
• The employee retirements are included in the savings calculations because “if our employees retire, and we don’t fill those positions, that’s money we don’t have to pay,” the mayor said.
• Those $2 million in “deferred benefits” Cushman cites include employee vacation, compensatory and other time, much of which will be taken as days off, not deferred until retirement, the mayor said.
• “If we get any money from the stimulus, our first place we’ll put the money is back into our fund balance,” not into union benefits, he said.
“That’s six for six – he got them all wrong,” Avedisian said, describing Cushman as still upset over his defeat in last year’s election.
Moreover, the mayor said, “One of the reasons it’s down as a special meeting is, we lose $17,000 per day if we don’t reach these savings,” so city officials hope to approve the contracts as soon as possible, Avedisian added.
The meeting is scheduled for 7 p.m. tomorrow in the Council Chambers at Warwick City Hall, 3275 Post Road. A presentation by the finance committee will precede the council’s vote on whether to ratify, the city says in its public notice.
News and information from the City of Warwick are available at www.WarwickRI.gov.