As we approach the Sept. 18 adoption of the City of San Antonio FY 2015 Budget, please allow me the opportunity to summarize the police and fire labor union contract situation in clear terms.
The City of San Antonio has tremendous respect and appreciation for our firefighters and police officers, and it is reflected in the fact that they are among the best compensated in the state. When you combine their base salaries with special pay, our public safety salaries are second only to Austin in the state of Texas. In the past eight years, the City has added 473 police officers and firefighters while cutting 1,200 civilian positions as part of our effort to focus on core services and manage our budget.
(Read more: Mayor Invites Police Union Back to the Table.)
San Antonio police officers and firefighters also have a rich benefits package that includes no monthly healthcare premiums for themselves or their families; a taxpayer-funded legal fund that they can use to pay for divorces, child custody disputes, DUI defenses and other personal legal expenses; employer contributions to their pensions equal to 24.6 percent of their salaries; employer contributions to a post-retirement healthcare fund equal to 9.4 percent of their salaries; and unlimited tuition reimbursement, regardless of whether the education they receive applies to their jobs or even whether they graduate from the program.
When you combine above-average pay with rich benefits, the result is a City of San Antonio workforce where more than 400 of the 500 highest-compensated employees are uniformed public safety personnel, less than half of whom live in the City of San Antonio.
This imbalance is crowding out other priority services that the City is expected to provide. If we are to build, maintain and operate the streets, sidewalks, parks, libraries, senior centers and other services that taxpayers want, we must get public safety expenses under control. Public safety currently consumes 66.5 percent of the General Fund budget; all other General Fund programs and services share the remaining 33.5 percent. According to the recent 2014 community-wide survey of over 1,000 City of San Antonio residents across all 10 City Council Districts, 70 percent support public safety personnel contributing to healthcare benefits like other City employees.
A task force of business and community leaders – including union and public safety pension fund representatives – met for more than five months to study the issue. They made a series of recommendations that the City is now pursuing, beginning with reining in healthcare costs for firefighters and police officers, the fastest-growing portion of the public safety budget.
It is important to understand that we are not talking about on-the-job healthcare coverage; firefighters and police officers have dangerous jobs, and the injuries suffered in the line of duty are covered 100 percent by the City. We are asking police officers and firefighters to share the costs of their everyday healthcare coverage, like the kind of policy you carry for yourself and your family.
In the FY 2015 City budget which begins Oct. 1, I have recommended that the City Council exercise its authority, which is expressly permitted in the labor union agreements, to make changes to public safety healthcare benefits as part of the annual budget process. Healthcare benefits are included in the police and fire Collective Bargaining Agreements and have historically been negotiated between the labor unions and the City.
Unfortunately, neither union has agreed to bargain prior to adoption of the FY 2015 Budget, in part because the current agreements have a 10-year evergreen clause – meaning the contracts continue for 10 years after they expire – which the City believes is unconstitutional and bad public policy. No other City in Texas has a 10-year perpetual contract.
The FY 2015 Proposed Budget, which must be adopted in September, includes no layoffs of uniform or civilian employees and meets the unions halfway, by splitting the difference in what the City currently spends on uniformed healthcare and civilian healthcare. If approved by the Council, the City would budget $10,000 per uniformed employee for healthcare, and police officers and firefighters would be required to contribute to the cost of their own healthcare, just as most people do.
The police and fire labor union agreements expire Sept. 30, and we are certain that this issue could be settled within two weeks if the labor unions would come to the bargaining table. While we prefer that they help craft the solution and agree to any changes to their healthcare plans, the City Council is prepared to adopt a budget with the proposed healthcare benefit changes if the unions refuse to negotiate.
San Antonio is not unique in dealing with rising costs of public safety. Cities across the country are grappling with the issues of escalating healthcare and public safety expenses.
San Antonio taxpayers can no longer afford to offer our public safety personnel a benefits package that is out of line with what other Texas cities and San Antonio private employers provide their employees. The labor union agreements have been in place for 25 years and the current benefits are simply not affordable or sustainable for San Antonio taxpayers.
This article has been republished with permission from the City Manager’s office.
*Featured/top image: Photo courtesy of SAPD Facebook page.
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I think as reasonable approach is called for, after all we can’t shut down every library in town. Its only fair that police and firemen pay something on theirs family care.
So I guess you think a person you count on, on the worst day of your life is not a valuable asset in this city. I hope you never have to experience calling 911 for a true emergency, but if you do, wouldn’t you want highly trained and healthy individuals to show up? Start making any job less desirable, and see how fast the quality of employees decreases.
I think as reasonable approach is called for, after all we can’t shut down every library in town. Its only fair that police and firemen pay something on theirs family care.
sapd is overpaid. talk about contracts that need to be restructured.and then for these individuals to not contribute to the city via taxes…and $$$ for education regardless of every completing a degree program…then to allow them to carry an extended ‘shelf life’ is just ridiculous…IT IS TIME TO MAKE SOME CHANGES!
Pensions, legal funds, tuition, and sky-high salaries are not justifiable or reasonable when you look at compensation across private industry. This is often the case with tax-funded jobs. Because there’s no profit, no loss, there is no direct tie to the economy to check these rates of compensation. Changes are overdue. And it is telling, too, that the fire dept is one of the hardest jobs to get into. They turn away tons of qualified applicants simply because the demand for the job is so high.
My healthcare benefits with USAA are really good; they give you $1000 a year on a health credit card to meet your deductibles. But I still pay $120 a paycheck for insurance, and I certainly don’t make the $70k a year that police officers make. So the question of affordability is moot; so what then? Is it that they are more deserving? Possibly, but to a point. As a citizen who works for one of the most reputable private companies in the city and even the nation, I understand not wanting to lose benefits- but their package just isn’t comparable or manageable. What’s disappointing is that most police officers and firefighters in this city are conservative, but they can’t recognize the hypocrisy of benefitting from a socialist system. I know a higher-ranking police officer who thinks the military gets too much benefits, but this is the same thing. One would think they would appreciate that their city is trying to maintain it’s A credit rating and be fiscally responsible by balancing the budget.
Let me say the city manager’s signature is on every contract that police or fire have ever had. If there is something wrong, something that is going to break the city, she has failed to address it. I find it interesting that she has signed off on insurance, degrees, tuition reimbursement, and the overtime paid out, yet nothing has been said for years, even with her name on the contract, approving it all. The way it is written, one could believe that police and fire have somehow been sneaking all of this stuff around her back, without her prior approval or knowledge. As for the lies in the article in the Express News, let’s set the record straight. The legal fund is not set up for, nor does it cover, criminal/civil charges brought against an officer or firefighter, on-duty or off-duty. It does cover wills and estate documents because there is a greater than normal chance that the officer or firefighter will die in the course of his/her duties and to leave your family in probate court is unacceptable. The tuition assistance is not unlimited. There is an email sent out every year, normally around the half way point of the fiscal year, that states the department is out of funds for tuition reimbursement. The biggest lie is the city covers on-duty injuries 100% with workers compensation. I encourage any person in this city to ask a firefighter or police officer if they have ever had a workers comp claim taken care of, with the first submission, second, or otherwise. This is the reason that their insurance is so important. The city rejects workers comp claims on a regular basis, so the only way for the officer or firefighter to be medically cared for is with their own insurance. SAPOA went to the table with two different options to contribute more money to insurance and they were rejected at the negotiating table, without the negotiators taking the proposal back and considering the options. That’s not negotiating, that is demanding, and that isn’t how it works. Police and fire running the insurance in a trust, with more contributions, is the smart way to handle this. The city in inept at managing money (see railcar, alamodome, etc.) and the police and fire associations are very good at it (see police and fire pension, retiree healthcare, etc.). Please don’t believe what comes out in print and take it as the gospel. Ask around, do some research, contact the police and fire associations, and don’t be lead down the path of what is in the only paper this city has.
Mrs. Sculley loves to talk about ethical. If she is so ethical why did she threaten to lay off officers and then lie about it when Michael Helle questioned her about it. Helle said he would be willing to take a lie detector test about her statements but she refuses to accept this challenge to her honesty. How can we trust someone who says one thing and does another? If Mrs. Sculley was so concerned about the health of the budget she would take a healthy pay cut from her nearly $400,000 per yer salary. We are tired of the “Do as I say not do as I do” attitude Mrs. Sculley demonstrates. Mrs. Sculley has spun these lies into a nice little web she hopes you fall into.
The other thing that Mrs Sculley won’t tell you is that both of the Police and Fire Unions have turned down numerous pay raises over the years in order to keep our benefits. She also won’t tell you that should the Police and Fire Unions be forced to have to use the evergreen clause in their contracts that they will not get a penny for a raise for up to 10 years if a new contract is not agreed upon. She also won’t tell you that she has received more that a %100 pay increase since she was hired and now makes more than the President of the USA or that she got her husband a cush job with the county. She uses funky math in her findings. She claims the money the city receives from CPS and SAWS when it comes to the city’s bond rating but seems to forget to add them in to the budget when she starts claiming that the sky is falling and that we need to cut spending. She also wasted thousands of dollars on a core values awareness program sent out to every fireman that could have been sent out via email.
Let’s tell the whole truth in this debate.
While civilian city employees took raises instead of benefits since the 80?s, fire and police took the benefits. Why? For one the city asked us to, see if it is taken as a benefit it costs the taxpayer less, no retirement to be paid out like a raise…
Mrs. Sculley likes to compare us to Austin Texas, so lets do the full comparison…
Austin spends 51% of government wide basic activities funds on public safety while San Antonio spends 38%.
Austin is slightly more than half our size, yet they spend 13% more of their government wide basic activities on public safety.
Austin makes half the runs San Antonio fire/ems does yet has only 16% fewer employees than San Antonio does.
Your San Antonio fire/ems serve 251 more taxpayers per employee than Austin for $197 per taxpayer less than Austin.
San Antonio Fire/Ems cost less than Austin per employee yet we do twice the work.
So what does this say??? It says you get a whole lot more bang for your buck than pretty much anyone else in the country when it comes to public safety in San Antonio.
Do you know what Houston, Miami, Dallas, El Paso, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Green Bay, and Oakland all have in common?
They all spend a larger percentage of their budget on public safety than San Antonio. Don’t buy the hype without doing the research. All those cities most recent CAFR is 2012 online, look it up for yourself…
Texas has a presumptive cancer law since fire fighters are 3 times more likely to get some cancers than the general population, a law passed by a very conservative Texas legislature. The law states certain cancers must be paid for under workman’s compensation. San Antonio City government is a 100%… In denying these cancer workers comp claims… Instead they force our members who get these cancers to use their insurance to stay alive so that Mrs. Sculley can spike our insurance costs.
Anyone feeling they may not be getting the whole story? I feel like the city manager has neglected to tell the whole story. I feel like the city manager has twisted the truth by selling the general fund as government wide basic activities, when the general fund has been decreased in percentage of funding at her hand and is only a part of the government wide basic activities. The fact is if we could simply move up to the the same funding percentage as Phoenix, one of the lowest in the nation, it would increase our budget by 95 million dollars.
These facts matter and need to be part of this discussion for a fair and balanced negotiation.
Now please contact city council and tell them you understand the facts…
* City Council main number is 210.207.7040
Steve