RACINE — A plan that would have required most Racine police officers and firefighters to pay draconian health insurance deductibles may be off the table completely.
Gathered Tuesday evening at City Hall, 730 Washington Ave., members of the City Council had been slated to vote on whether to approve that plan, but voted 13-0 to defer taking action after learning that the city and police and fire unions had reached a tentative contract agreement.
Administration officials and the two unions have been in negotiations for the past several months and were preparing to begin mediation later this month.
“We just want to inform everybody that the city and the public safety unions — Firefighters Local 321 and the Racine Police Association — have reached a tentative agreement, settling the successive bargaining agreements,” Mayor John Dickert said just before the aldermen voted.
Recommended by the Finance and Personnel Committee two weeks ago, the high-deductible plan put forth by administration officials just last month had called for firefighters hired on or before June 30, 2011, to pay health insurance deductibles of $6,450 for a single person or $12,900 for a family.
The officials had said the high-deductible plan was their best attempt at getting about $2 million in benefits savings needed to help close a projected budget deficit of between $4 million and $6 million.
Following the meeting, both union leaders and Dickert said they were pleased with the tentative agreement they had reached but could not provide details.
The deal is expected to go before the Finance and Personnel Committee for review next week, and the full City Council a week after that.
“We have always made it clear to (the city) that we are willing to do our part to work with the city to address its fiscal situation in a way that doesn’t overly burden the officers and firefighters who risk their safety to protect our streets,” said Racine Police Criminalist Todd Hoover, the president of the Racine Police Association, following the vote, reading a statement for both unions. “We believe that this development represents a constructive first step forward toward a more effective working relationship that will not only benefit the city and its officers and firefighters but the community we are here to serve as well.”
11th-hour deal
More than 80 people attended the meeting, most of them police officers and firefighters and their friends and family members. Sitting silently during the meeting, many gathered in the hallway outside the City Council chambers after the vote to shake the hands of their union leaders and chat with fellow members.
Hoover said the unions and city had reached the agreement at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday after spending all afternoon in meetings. He said he owed it to those union members to give them the details of the agreement first.
Dickert said he called the meetings in an effort to end the back-and-forth between the city and the employee groups.
“We just decided that it was best for us just to sit down and see what we could get resolved and I give them a lot of credit: We did,” he said. “It just shows the real strength of this community.”
Asked if the tentative agreement would deliver the benefit savings the city had been seeking from the two unions, Dickert said: “It is what we had hoped for.”
Why the deductibles?
When the city and the unions — the only employee groups still able to bargain for benefits under state law — began contract negotiations this summer, Deputy City Attorney Scott Letteney told Finance Committee members it was the administration’s hope that the city would able to get $2 million in concessions through pension savings. What the city wanted, he explained, was for police and firefighters to pay the employee share of their monthly Wisconsin Retirement System contributions, as other city employees do.
When those negotiations reached an impasse last month, Letteney told the committee that the only way the city would be able to achieve the savings it needed this close to budget season was to require the union members to have the high-deductible plan.
Asked why they had chosen to single out police and firefighters to provide those benefit concessions and through the proposal of such high deductibles, administration officials said Tuesday the city needed to save on personnel costs and had already obtained savings from other employee groups in the form of wage freeze and pension contributions.
Because the police officers and firefighters can’t negotiate health care plan design, hiking the deductibles was the only way to achieve those savings without the unions’ approval, they explained.
“When those are the only tools that you have to work with, that is what you are forced to resort to,” City Administrator Tom Friedel said Tuesday, prior to the announcement of the tentative contract agreement.
The high-deductible plan was never discussed during contract negotiations with the unions, because state law bars public officials and unions from bargaining over health care plan design or its impact. Only the size of monthly health care premiums can be discussed.
Speaking to The Journal Times Editorial Board on Monday, Hoover and Capt. Jeff Peterson, president of Racine Firefighters Local 321, called the deductibles punishing, saying they had offered to contribute to their pensions as far back as Aug. 22, and had only asked for modest wage increases — 5 percent over three years — in return.