by Aaron Hanson, President

On Tuesday April 8^th, two members of the city council, Chuck Sigerson and Jim Vokal, took the unprecedented step of revealing a confidential union contract offer to the City of Omaha. Their premature rush to judgment and poorly thought out inflammatory public statements were potentially very damaging to any future good-faith attempts at collaboration to address our pension-funding dilemma. Their antics make it hard to have any confidence that these two councilmen, once considered good friends to Omaha Police officers, could ever be engaged in trust-based good-faith negotiations with us ever again. It isn’t the fact they disagreed with our concepts that has served to damage our past good relationship and trust, a lot of politicians do that from time to time, but rather the purely political and self serving manner in which they disagreed that makes it so unforgivable. On April 10^th, after dedicating a measly four meetings and 6 hours and 15 minutes of time towards negotiating pension, wages and healthcare matters, the Mayor declared that he was at negotiations impasse with your police union. At his press conference, the Mayor discussed the city’s offer and explained why he thought it was reasonable. We simply disagreed and now I’ll take the opportunity to explain to you why.

Wages: The City demanded that police officers accept a 3.5% wage increase over all three years of the contract. This offer might not seem unreasonable on its face, and in fact may have normally been an acceptable offer, had it not been for all the hidden increased costs of health care and pension contributions that would have virtually consumed your entire pay raise. The cost of living is on the rise and we cannot allow our hard-working brave officers and their families to fall behind.

Healthcare: The City demanded a 5% monthly premium that, once again, does not seem too unreasonable until you understand that the premium would be based on the COBRA rate – a large convoluted calculation that lumps both retiree and active employee healthcare costs together in combination with additional administrative fees. We offered to pay a monthly premium, so long as the premium was based on tangible and actual officer usage rates as opposed to some hocus pocus number generated by a bureaucrat bean counter. In addition to a premium, the City demanded that you accept deep cuts into your benefit structure that, as mentioned above, would have increased your out-of-pocket medical expenses and chewed up your pay raise. One of the most common comments we received in our membership contract surveys was the need for wellness coverage for our children and spouses. The City flat out refused to extend wellness coverage and preventative care to our children and offered an insulting and meager wellness benefit of $175 every two years for our spouses.

Pension: Omaha police officers pay one of the highest pension contributions in the nation. A whopping $14.55 of every $100 we earn goes toward our pension benefit. It is true that we have a good pension benefit, but it is also important to understand that your pension benefit is well below comparability when it comes to cost of living increases. A cost of living adjustment, or COLA, is essentially an annual post retirement pension increase that ensures that your pension check will keep up with the future cost of living. For example, what $65,000 will buy you today; will cost you $110,000 to buy 25 years from now. Our current pension has what I refer to as a "front end COLA". Because our annual pension supplement is capped at a flat $600/year – as opposed to the standard 3% in typical police pension systems, officers must attain a high pension in the early years of retirement in order to try to minimize the natural cost of living increases. The City’s offer, which did not include any COLA in return for a reduction in front-end pension benefits, would have cut your pensions back to the point that you would have experienced a massive loss of spending power in your golden years. Not only did they demand to gut your pension benefit, they expected you to pay a higher pension contribution in return. Under the City’s demand – which would have increased the pension contribution to an unheard of 16.3% – would have meant an officer making $70,000 would be required to dump an additional $1225 per year into the pension fund starting in 2010. Essentially, the City expected you to downgrade from a Cadillac to a Yugo, all the while paying a Porsche car payment.

Comp Time restrictions: The City demanded that you give up your ability to cash in your hard earned comp time banks until your final years of retirement. The City experiences millions of dollars of savings from the compensatory time banks in which officers bank overtime hours to use as time off or take as cash later. This restriction would simply be unfair to our officers. Given their wishes in that area, I would strongly urge each of you to give much consideration as to whether you will take future overtime payments in the form of cash or compensatory time.

Bottom line: The City’s offer was unacceptable. They simply wanted too much, too fast and without any real concern for the impact that such changes would have had on your family. We were looking for a "win - win". What we were offered was a "win – lose".

Stay safe.

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