Columnist Jeff German: Police not giving up on deal

Sunday, Oct. 16, 2005 | 10:32 a.m.

In this age of terrorism, fighting over the size of a collective bargaining agreement for police, the protectors of the community, isn't very smart.

We are in the middle of a monster of a fight -- the cops vs. the county -- that could make losers out of everyone, especially the community.

"It's very sad," says Kent Oram, a longtime political consultant who has aligned himself the last 22 years with the Las Vegas Police Protective Association (PPA), the union that represents some 2,400 Metro cops.

"Who wins in a situation like this? I don't like to see them nitpicking over tiny percentages."

Dave Kallas, the PPA's executive director, is about as hot as anyone.

His anger is directed at the county commissioners, who have gone to the extreme to scuttle the tentative contract Kallas negotiated for the cops. The contract guarantees officers a 25.6 percent increase in wages and benefits over the next four years.

"This is the most disgraceful display of manipulative government I've ever seen," Kallas says. "If they're going to manipulate the system in public like this, what are they doing when we're not watching them?"

Kallas is talking about the unprecedented move Tuesday to pull County Commissioner Tom Collins from the Metro Fiscal Affairs Committee, the five-member panel that oversees the police department's budget, and replace him with Commission Chairman Rory Reid.

Collins is being removed because he supports the contract against the will of the rest of the commissioners, who believe it's too lucrative for the cops.

Without Collins on the Fiscal Affairs Committee, Kallas now concedes, the county has enough votes to kill the contract when the police panel meets Oct. 24. That would steer the negotiating process to an independent fact-finder and, if necessary, a binding arbitrator.

But if you think Kallas and the cops are giving up, you'd be wrong.

Kallas tells me he hopes to file an open meeting law complaint against the county commissioners with the attorney general. The commissioners, he charges, may have unlawfully "polled" themselves behind closed doors when they decided Collins must be bounced from Fiscal Affairs.

Also under consideration, Kallas says, is a complaint with the Employee Management Relations Board, which handles public employee labor disputes, accusing the commissioners of tampering with the collective bargaining process.

The county's maneuvering, meanwhile, could prolong the contract negotiations well into the 2006 campaign season, which won't make the politically active cops happy campers.

"The last thing we need to see is low morale on a police force that is defending the community," says Jane McAlevey, the executive director of the local Service Employees International Union. "At the bottom of this is the county's unwillingness to deal with the cost of growth."

McAlevey is more than just an observer here. In the spring she'll be negotiating with the county on behalf of some 10,000 public employees whose contracts expire.

These talks are the driving force behind the county's tough stance with the cops. County bigwigs don't want to set too high a wage standard for the rest of the workers.

"It's a very uncomfortable position for me," Reid says. "I'm a Democrat. I'm a union guy. I've never said the things I'm saying right now to a union.

"But when I wake up in the middle of the night staring at the ceiling, I don't just worry about the cops. I worry about a lot of different things."

After Tuesday Reid may have one more thing to worry about -- his political future. He's up for re-election next year, along with two other commissioners, Lynette Boggs McDonald and Myrna Williams.

Kallas and the cops, known for handing out sought-after political endorsements, don't plan to forget the politicians who burned them come election time.