After a marathon negotiating session Friday, the City of San Antonio and firefighters union signed a tentative labor contract.

The deal gives firefighters and paramedics across the board 20% in raises — a 7% raise in fiscal year 2025, followed by another 8% in 2026 and 5% in 2027.

The contract will cost $109.6 million and puts a $27 million-dollar hole in the city’s budget over the next three years, city negotiators said. The city had been budgeting for a nearly $82 million contract.

Next, the tentative agreement will go before members of the San Antonio Professional Firefighters Association for ratification in the coming weeks before heading to City Council likely in late September.

This would be the first contract fire union members have had an opportunity to vote on since 2009. The current contract was crafted by a panel of arbitrators after a bitter, years-long battle.

Negotiations had been on-again, off-again this round over the last seven months, but officials buckled in at 10 a.m. Friday for the long haul. They hammered out contract language and inched toward each other’s wage proposals throughout the day until formally signing the tentative agreement just after midnight.

Though tensions had flared throughout negotiations, it was all smiles around the large table inside the Municipal Plaza building downtown as each member of the opposing teams shook hands.

The top priority in this contract for most firefighters and paramedics was wage increases and after seven months of back-and-forth, they landed on a total of 20% in raises over three years across the board. It’s roughly the same number that the city initially proposed stretching out over five years.

Also, if the contract is approved by council, $2,400 in current incentive and uniform pay will shift over to base pay.

“This is a good contract for our firefighters and our paramedics,” said María Villagómez, deputy city manager and lead negotiator for the City of San Antonio. “It keeps us competitive with other cities in Texas, which was the goal of the city. … We are thankful for that.”

Joe Jones, president of the fire union, was also thankful.

“People said it couldn’t be done,” Jones said. “Is it perfect? It’s not perfect. It’s never perfect. That’s part of collaboration, that’s part of compromise, but we stuck to it.”

A tentative agreement on the books gives the city some clarity as it finalizes its fiscal year 2025 budget, which starts Oct. 1.

Council members are slated to vote on the budget on Sept. 19, but before they do, they will need to decide how to cover the $27 million-dollar gap between what it budgeted for and how much the contract will actually cost, Villagómez said.

“We’re going to have to identify … areas to reduce spending [or] perhaps increase revenue over the next three years,” VIllagómez said.

City staff is already suggesting $36.6 million in spending reductions over the next two years due to forecasted revenue declines.

The union represents a vast majority of SAFD’s roughly 1,800 firefighters and paramedics — who didn’t receive regular, base pay increases from 2014 to 2020 while the current contract was battled out. Currently, a first-year firefighter receives $57,576 in base pay and the longest-tenured district chief receives $106,872.

The last path to a contract involved lawsuits, court-ordered mediation, dramatic press conferences and a fierce proposition election initiated by the fire union.

Through the 2018 election, the union successfully limited the pay and tenure of city managers to eight years and won the right to call for binding arbitration in its contract negotiations. The union ultimately flexed that right to arrive at the current contract adopted in 2020, about six years after the previous contract expired.

Compared to the years of negotiations leading up to the 2020 contract, both the city and the union congratulated themselves and the other side early Saturday for how much progress was made so quickly.

Both sides gave up on or made concessions on various proposals along the way. For instance, the city abandoned an attempt to adjust changes to how overtime is calculated and the union dropped an ask to remove marijuana from random drug tests.

The current round of talks started with cautious optimism in February, then headed toward turmoil in May when several city council members called for more “transparency” around the then-stalled contract negotiations. Ultimately, the full council was given a status update one week later with little fanfare and talks restarted at the bargaining table.

The tentative contract puts firefighters and paramedics “on a path to health,” Jones said after the meeting.