Dream a little dream: LV officials hope to curtail city worker salaries

Never gonna happen.

No way, Jose.

Can I say it any clearer?

Don’t count on the unions representing Las Vegas city workers, firefighters, corrections officers and marshals agreeing to a one-time salary freeze or a reduction in future salary increases starting in July.

Those are two of the options the Las Vegas City Council will consider today at a special 9 a.m. meeting at the Charleston Heights Arts Center, 800 S. Brush St., as the council discusses how to cut $150 million from the budgets over the next five years.

The meeting is expected to last all day as the council discusses pages of suggestions from a Fundamental Services Review. If future salary reductions are a route they choose, the council is most likely wasting its time.

The Las Vegas City Employees Association is planning to pack the meeting. CEA President Tommy Ricketts sent his members a request to read the Fundamental Service Review and look for errors. He was unhappy the city didn’t ask workers where to cut as part of this five-month study.

Yet despite the antagonistic tone of his letter, I’m hearing city officials are encouraged by meetings with CEA to discuss “considerations.” (The word concession is carefully avoided in these discussions.)

It’s down to this: Double-digit tax revenue increases are a thing of the past, so city workers need to take a hit to avoid layoffs. Because the unions have contracts carefully detailing compensation, they would have to agree to these proposals in upcoming negotiations. The first contract expires early next year: the Las Vegas firefighters union.

But everything is intertwined, and it’s that complexity that will doom any spirit of cooperation. Firefighters President Dean Fletcher wants police salaries to be on the table as well. However, the county and city set the police salaries together, so the city can’t just cut them back.

At this point, it sounds as if the city employees and firefighters unions are taking the position it has to be all-or-nothing when it comes to salary reductions. Unless there’s some injection of altruism through a shared needle, I’m predicting the city will be laying off people because officials won’t persuade union leaders to accept voluntary contract changes.

The union might agree to step to the plate in light of today’s disastrous economy, but they’d want promises of being made whole when the economy improves. But one City Council can’t tell a future City Council what to do in future contract negotiations.

Can you see why I’m saying there will be layoffs before there are salary freezes or lower raises?

City employees won’t agree if the firefighters are not included. And the firefighters won’t agree because they don’t want to feel the pain if the police don’t. And the city might contribute to the police budget, but without agreement from the county, city negotiators can’t ask for “considerations” in police contracts.

Union leaders are like politicians. It’s their job to do the best they can for their members. If they agree to a bunch of reductions that hurt their members, they won’t get re-elected, according to a study the city is relying on. “The City’s Achilles’ heel is its extremely generous employee compensation package,” said the Kirchhoff & Associates report. The average wage for Nevada’s state and local governments in 2007 was $46,000, while the average wage for the city of Las Vegas employee was $76,000, the report said.

But there’s little incentive for union leaders to say yes to compensation reductions when they see the bill draft requested by the city of Las Vegas that “allows local governments to resolve certain contract disputes by processes other than arbitration.” To union leaders, this bill draft sounds suspiciously like an end-run around binding contract negotiations.

Get ready for layoffs, followed by employees bumping less senior employees out of their jobs as union contracts allow.

I hope I’m wrong. But let me know if a union leader at today’s meeting steps up and says: “Sure, we’ll take a hit if it means no layoffs, We want to do our part.”

Rank-and-file might say it today, but no union leader is going to make such a concession, oops, consideration. It’s not in their best interest.

Jane Ann Morrison’s column appears Monday, Thursday and Saturday. E-mail her at Jane@reviewjournal.com or call (702) 383-0275.