Commentary: New Council Eschews the Punt Formation

From 2006 until only the last few years, one of our favorite expressions was that the council majority was lining up in punt formation to push off another hard decision for a future council.

The current council has actually had a rather remarkable run of putting to bed some of the tough and vexing issues: fire staffing cuts – done.  Structural reform and budget cuts – done.  Road pavement funding – moving forward.  Fifth Street redesign – moving forward.  Surface Water Project – about to be built.  Wastewater treatment plant – about to go to bid.

Do not equate this commentary with agreement on all issues.  In fact, I have some real problems still on both of the water projects.  But my point is, we are never going to agree 100% with anyone, but we want leaders to make the tough decisions and not put them off to another council.

One of the most critical issues still lingering is two employee contracts – fire and DCEA (Davis City Employees Association).  My regular readers know where this is going, undoubtedly, but for brevity’s sake, five of the seven bargaining groups have signed new MOUs that will project millions in savings into the future through larger employee pick ups of pensions, a future second tier for reduction in pensions, reform for retiree health benefits, and a reduction in the city’s absurd payout for cafeteria cashout funds.

However, as we have recently learned, the two groups that have failed to reach agreement are heading into the impasse situation – the city recently announced factfinding had commenced and within a month or two we will see a public meeting where the last, best, and final offer is imposed on the two bargaining groups.

This is in striking contrast to the bargaining rounds of three years ago, where the council sold us well short of where we needed to go and left the heavy lifting to future councils.

In fact, in perverse ways, the council almost admitted that they were punting and leaving the heavy lifting to future councils.

A commentary from January 2010, which questions the math behind the council majority’s grandiose claims of budget cuts from the 2009 firefighters memorandum of understanding (MOU), captures the fascinating dynamic of then-councilmember Stephen Souza’s comments.

Mr. Souza argued that there was an “analogy that you can turn something around immediately.”  It was a strawman argument at the time, but he said, “I would have loved to have seen a much further turning of this aircraft carrier in this year, but I’m happy that I’m on a council that has begun that movement and that turn in the direction of the citizens of this community that are paying those salaries and benefits.”

I would, late in my commentary, make the statement, “With all due respect to the councilmember, the meeting last night was indeed the Council Majority lining up in punt formation and handing the problem over to the rank and file employees as well as the next council to clean up the mess.”

This was exactly what the decision was about and exactly what this new council has had to do.

However,  I believe I must have made a public comment charging that the city council was indeed punting on this issue, because later Mr. Souza seemingly responded, “I would much rather punt rather than continue to have a score on you as a city by the bargaining groups.  That score is a continued upward movement.  That means we’re playing good defense when you force someone to punt.”

I would respond, “My argument and use of the punting analogy was to suggest that the current council was punting the bulk of the difficult decisions to future councils.  His statement that we’re playing good defense when you force someone to punt is completely misplaced.  We haven’t forced anyone to punt, they forced us to punt. “

I continued, “Apparently he is arguing that the bargaining groups are playing good defense against us.  I’m not sure how us punting prevents the bargaining groups from scoring on ‘us’ as a city.  It seems it simply gives them the ball back in three years and we have not proven we can stop them from scoring except this year when we had the aid of a huge penalt[y] in the form of a $3.5 million deficit not only for this year but for the foreseeable future.  Without such impediments, it does not seem nearly as likely that future councils will have the leverage to continue with structural changes.”

Those words, written in January 2010, were interesting.  In a sense, I could not have foreseen the sea-change that occurred by the time the MOUs came up again in 2012.  By the time the first contracts were signed for the 2012 MOUs, we had five new councilmembers.  We had gone through an interim city manager and hired a new city manager.  And our finance director in 2010 is now Woodland’s city manager.

The new council and new city manager were elected and hired respectively to fix the budget.  They have succeeded in creating a new contract structure that will do exactly that and they have successfully convinced five of the seven bargaining groups to agree to that structure.

At the same time, council is still cleaning up the problems left to them from the past council.  While Mr. Souza can defend his vote by arguing that they began the process – what they did was extremely modest and the heavy lifting occurred in this round of MOUs, not in 2009.

Mr. Souza continued: “In this contract and sought through negotiations, it’s not demands, it would be great if we could just demand upon our employees, we are going to tell you that you are going to take this, well that’s not the way that negotiations work, it’s a give and take and you get to a point where you reach an agreement hopefully and not have to go to a process called impasse, as we have and are in the process of with one of the bargaining units.”

When they did finally impose impasse on DCEA back in 2010, the city failed to follow the law by the book and ended up having the Pubilc Employment Relations Board (PERB) and an administrative law judge overturn it.  Eventually that would lead to the 2012 layoffs of nine DCEA employees when the group still refused to take the concessions that every other employee group had taken.

The current impasse situation with DCEA stems from mistakes made back in 2009 and 2010 that led to the eventual botched imposition of the last, best, and final offer, but more importantly, by going to impasse both groups are hoping to change the game.  They know there will not be a three-year contract.

Instead, the contract will get imposed, and they will go back to the bargaining table in hopes that when Joe Krovoza is off the council in 2014, perhaps Dan Wolk as well, they can get their people elected to council and have them negotiate a much more favorable contract than the one we have now.  When the council finally did take a hard and difficult vote on the budget in June 2011, it was Mr. Krovoza, Rochelle Swanson and Mr. Wolk who formed the 3-2 majority, not anyone from the 2006-2010 council.

It is a game of running out the clock, played by DCEA and fire, but the punts in earlier quarters allowed them the time to run out the clock now – to torture my analogies.

That said, this strategy seems unlikely to succeed.  The firefighters, for all of their gusto and scare tactics, hardly moved many people to their side in the more contentious staffing debate.

On the other hand, the contract issue seems to have far broader support.  While you can argue that the staffing issue bled into the area of public safety (I don’t agree with that argument, but it can be argued), the contract issue is a purely financial issue and a matter of fairness.

The city is facing enormous structural deficits that are actually expected to grow as deferred bills come due.  The city has a choice – they can cut services or reduce compensation.

I cannot predict where this process ultimately ends.  However, I will go out on a limb and suggest there will not be any talk of punt formations or kicking the can down the road.  This council – agree or disagree with them – just doesn’t do that.

—David M. Greenwald reporting