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Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman said on Jan. 7, 2010, that the 8 percent salary and benefits cut the city’s so-called elective and appointive employees have agreed to take in lieu of layoffs won’t take effect unless the city’s employees represented by union contracts agree to do the same.
Sunday, Jan. 10, 2010 | 2 a.m.
Sun archives
- County lays off 67 workers, mostly building inspectors (1-8-2010)
- Las Vegas mayor calls on city employee unions to reopen contracts (1-7-2010)
- Report: Nevada public employees among highest paid in country(1-6-2010)
- Gibbons seeking overhaul of state education system (1-6-2010)
- Las Vegas City Council OKs 8 percent salary, benefits cut (1-6-2010)
- Commission Chairman Rory Reid unveils cost-cutting plan for county (1-4-2010)
- Clark County cost-cutting ideas center on salaries (12-30-09)
- Mayor: Morale not good among LV city employees (11-19-2010)
- Las Vegas to lay off 19 city employees as part of budget cuts (11-18-2010)
- Las Vegas officials seek public input on budget cuts (11-6-2009)
Rory Reid
Gov. Jim Gibbons
When Gov. Jim Gibbons suggested eliminating collective bargaining rights as part of an ambitious education reform proposal last week, he launched the latest attack on a group that’s shaping up to be this year’s political target: public employee unions.
Days before, Clark County Commission Chairman Rory Reid, a Democrat running for governor, called the county’s union contracts unsustainable and said negotiators would seek to rein in generous pay and benefits this year.
Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman, who’s mused about running for governor as an independent, said the collective bargaining process had “created a monster” and called on city employees — union and nonunion alike — to take an 8 percent pay cut in each of the next two years.
In Nevada and across the country, growing deficits and a sluggish economy are emboldening local, county and state officials to challenge public employee unions, once thought to be virtually untouchable because of their political muscle come election time. Labor experts say the recession and record unemployment has hardened public — and political — sentiment against public sector unions.
The showdown is the inevitable result of decades of organizing public employees while private-sector unionization numbers were in free-fall, said Janice Fine, a labor relations expert at Rutgers University. According to the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, government workers are nearly five times more likely to belong to a union than private sector workers.
“It’s easy to target public-sector workers in these economic times — and it will only get easier,” Fine said. “It gets harder and harder for private-sector workers to want to defend wages and pensions and benefits of public-sector workers when they look at their own and see them disappearing.”
Here, the unions also battle the perception that they do much better than their colleagues nationwide. For example, the average firefighter in Nevada makes nearly $95,000, or 48 percent more than the national average, according to data compiled and analyzed by the Sun last year. Local police officers make nearly $79,000, or 30 percent more than the national average.
Nevada labor leaders say their unions are being targeted unfairly, especially because their members make up the workforce of the leanest government in the country. Workers, they say, are compensated well but must do the jobs of many, at a time when demand for public services is at an all-time high.
Danny Thompson, executive secretary-treasurer of the Nevada AFL-CIO, said the attack on unions is a wholesale deflection from the failure of the state’s elected leaders to diversify the tax base.
“If you did away with collective bargaining it wouldn’t solve the problem,” he said. “You would still have a tax base that’s reliant on one group of people: gaming.”
Still, unions seem to realize that after decades of winning generous pay and benefits for their members, the economy has eroded their leverage. Experts say public employee unions have to walk a fine line as they negotiate new contracts and reopen existing ones.
Reaching ‘the boiling point’
Defenders and critics of public-sector wages and benefits see the same cause for the current scrutiny: Those in the private sector are suffering, while public workers seem untouched by the recession.
“Times are really tough. People are losing their jobs,” said John Oceguera, the Democratic Assembly majority leader who is also a North Las Vegas assistant fire chief. “One of the stable jobs out there is public employment. People who are without sometimes look at folks who are with, and there’s some sense (of), ‘why are they still working and employed, and I’m not.’ ”
Asked whether public employee contracts should be renegotiated, he said, “We have to look at everything. What services are provided, wages and benefits, what kind of efficiencies we can find.”
(Oceguera is in management, and not a member of the North Las Vegas fire department union.)
Thom Reilly, the Clark County manager between 2001 and 2006, said there’s clearly public unrest over government employee wages and benefits.
“In every analysis, the public sector has exceeded the private sector when you look at wages and benefits. In terms of fairness and equity, we’re out of balance,” Reilly said. “This is not just Las Vegas; this is brewing all across the United States. This is coming to the boiling point between unions and local governments.”
Reilly, who is head of the Harrah’s Foundation and a professor at San Diego State University, said he is collecting data on how the top 150 counties and top 150 cities are handling budget deficits.
“They’re either raising taxes or cutting services,” he said. “They’re not reducing wages.”
That means layoffs. Layoffs mean fewer people left to do government’s work. And that means fewer services for the public, while those public employees who are left remain largely unaffected.
State lawmakers, Reilly said, need to reform collective bargaining laws. If not, he believes citizens will take direct action with ballot initiatives.
But Rusty McAllister, president of the Professional Firefighters of Nevada, said changes in the state’s collective bargaining law aren’t needed because lawmakers tackled the issue in the 2009 session.
Legislators set a minimum number of meetings before labor and management can declare an impasse. In addition, if negotiations go to arbitration, the arbitrator must use like-sized departments in similar communities to evaluate offers and consider the ability of the government to pay a multiyear contract, he said.
Politically dangerous
As the CEO of Clark County government, Reilly for years argued that contracts given to public employees, with salary increases on top of “cost-of-living increases,” merit pay, longevity pay and expanded benefits, were untenable.
“Every year I took out my chart and argued that we cannot sustain salaries that doubled the Consumer Price Index increases,” Reilly said.
But the county and other local governments faced the politics of Carson City, where public employee labor lobbyists, particularly the firefighters and police unions, have a strong hand.
Take, for example, this point: The Legislature has granted local government employees the right to collectively bargain while withholding that right from state workers. Instead, state employees are told if and how much their salaries will increase by the Legislature.
(If state workers did have a contract, the Legislature would almost certainly not have been able to institute the furloughs it approved last year, which cut salaries by 4.6 percent and saved $333 million over two years.)
Reilly said state lawmakers could not budget with the rules they have set for the local governments.
Still, he said, legislators have called him during stalled county contract negotiations to try to influence him on behalf of their union supporters. Committee chairs, he added, threatened to hold up or defeat county bills in the Legislature because of tense contract negotiations. He declined to name the lawmakers.
But local government officials, who ultimately must approve the agreements, also bear some of the blame.
County commissioners and city council members have been eager for the endorsements of firefighters and police. Unions, including general employee unions, are also a source of campaign donations and volunteers to knock on doors, critical keys to victory in low-turnout local elections.
Elected officials have clashed with public employee unions. But those standoffs have brought consequences most politicians wouldn’t welcome.
In 2005, the union representing Metro Police officers was negotiating a contract with the city of Las Vegas and Clark County. The union wanted an increase of more than 25 percent in pay and benefits over four years, and had the backing of most City Council members and Sheriff Bill Young.
A majority of Clark County commissioners resisted, though, including Reid. The case went before an arbitrator, who sided with the county. Under state law, the arbitrator turned to the last and best offer from the county — a contract that amounted to an increase of more than 21 percent in personnel costs over four years.
The police union was not happy, and in particular targeted Republican Commissioner Lynette Boggs. The union believed she had sought support from the Las Vegas Review-Journal editorial board during negotiations, said David Kallas, who was then executive director of the Police Protective Association.
The union hired a private investigator who, after months of surveillance, emerged with damning video of Boggs living outside her district. Images of her picking up a newspaper from her driveway in a pink robe and taking out the trash played again and again on local news. Boggs lost re-election to a little-known Democratic candidate, Susan Brager.
Perhaps emboldened by such past union victories, Clark County firefighters have been defiant in response to management requests for wage concessions. (The average salary and benefits for the county’s 700 firefighters totals just under $200,000 per year.)
More than a year ago, the county asked the union to consider salary concessions to help alleviate the county’s shortfall. The county is facing a $126 million deficit next year, on top of this year’s $70 million deficit.
County administrators and commissioners said the union’s offer amounted to no concession at all.
SEIU made concessions
Kallas, who retired last year as the Las Vegas Police Protective Association lobbyist, sees the increased scrutiny of public employees as an extension of a campaign that groups such as the Greater Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce began waging last session. With the state short on tax revenue, the group tried to focus the debate on public employees’ wages and benefits to distract from the fact that most businesses in Nevada don’t pay their fair share in taxes, he said.
“This is truly about a philosophy,” Kallas said. “These groups see an opportunity to take advantage of.”
Last session, the Chamber of Commerce developed a list of reforms of public employee collective bargaining and retirement benefits. Republicans — two of whom were needed in the Senate to pass a tax increase — adopted those demands as a condition of their support for any tax increase.
With the Legislature facing a $2.5 billion budget hole in 2011 and the inevitability that taxes will be part of the discussion, the field is being set for public employee benefits to once again be on the table.
Last week, the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce released its second study in a year on the salaries of Nevada public employees. The study, which concluded the salaries are the sixth-highest in the nation, could fuel political momentum to change laws governing public employee unions.
“Public-sector unions have to present themselves as concerned and as partners with government in solving these fiscal crises,” said Fine, the Rutgers labor expert.
The Service Employees International Union, which represents about 9,500 county workers, seems to fit the model. Last year, the union reopened its contract with the county and agreed to lower cost-of-living increases, amounting to $15 million, according to SEIU President Al Martinez. The union also held focus groups and offered the County Commission a list of 200 cost-cutting ideas.
The SEIU begins talks for a new contract next month.
“We will be realistic with our demands and the standards we want to maintain,” Martinez said. “We will also remind the county that we’ve already made concessions.”
Michael J. Mishak can be reached at 259-2347 or at michael.mishak@lasvegas sun.com. David McGrath Schwartz can be reached at 775-687-4597 or at david.schwartz@lasvegassun.com.
Rory Reid says union contracts unsustainable....... Than why were they approved to begin with ?
Get these clowns out of office. And cut the pay of city administrators & council staff by half.
City managers earning a half a milllion per year just so they can run this town into the ground ???????
County Managers using sales tax revenue to fill budget gaps instead of hiring cops like he was supposed to. Is that guy in jail yet ?
Correction,
County manager should have said N Las Vegas City Manager.
Yes but a new city hall will create construction jobs and with city center done and I-15 done what is needed are jobs. Clark county alone paid out over 4 billion in wages last year and the top paid were firefighters a few who made over 600,000. Just an 8% cut would pay for over half of the city hall and create more jobs.
A fire fighter gets about $200,000 a year, and a police officer $79,000. If the 700 Clark County fire fighters were paid the same as local police officers, it would save the county over 84 million dollars a year.
Why should fire fighters get paid so much more than police?
Local public servants raking in over 600 grand a year. Our elected officials must be out of their freaking minds. That's more money than the president of the United States of America earns in a year.
All over the country it's the same thing union members thinking that they are better then everybody else. Guess what your time has come and you are no better then the rest of us and can take wage and benefit cuts just like the rest of us.
A Clark County firefighter gets about $200,000 when the national average is about $64,000. If they were being paid the naional average it would save the county about 94 MILLION DOLLARS A YEAR.
How firefighters justify being paid so much more than police?
How about cutting the salaries of the overpaid educrats (not the teachers) at the CCSD. Start by cutting the salary of Walt Ruffles and his comrades by 33%.
We as constituents need to know whom these legislators are that are committing what amounts to extortion. If we had some honest in depth accounting of what's going on at the State and local level, a few legislators may be handed their walking papers.
The salaries may be higher than private sector, but what very few will notice is that statement in the middle of the article about how Clark County is one of the leanest counties in the nation and that their people have a higher load because of it. Having said that, I think it would behoove the unions to talk their people into pay cuts to keep them working. I know that the County revised the longevity payments at one time--maybe again? Cost of living? That's a hard one. As to the salaries of police and firefighters, they are risking their lives for us and deserve whatever they can get. Having said THAT, I think that the inequity in salaries between police and firefighters should be fixed. I also realize that the figures they are throwing out are including the very high-priced management. The County doesn't talk about the $100,000 plus salaries of some of the people in the ivory tower and other departments. The County and many departments are top heavy--get some of those people to take early retirement or lay THEM off. That would clean up some of the budgets amazingly well.
The SEIU says,"We will be realistic with our demands and the standards we want to maintain,"
Well SEIU, we hate to tell you, but you won't be DEMANDING anything! The taxpayers will and it is time for change. Goodbye Joe Campbell! You are part of the problem and you must go.
yep, fire all those pesky public employees - they buy too many cars, houses and groceries anyway. Take their salaries and benefits and give them to all of you. Then,when all that dough is gone, everyone can be happy paupers together!! Yippee!! I guess we can all be equals while standing in the bread line and waiting to die at UMC.
Grandma Crabby is right - we've allowed this to devolve into a class warfare fight and killing all the public workers, which I note 72 lost their county jobs on Friday, ain't gonna fix a damn thing. There is a class thing going on, but not the one you think.
Tom Reilly is part of the problem, not a voice of higher reason. He's enjoying the cush life, as part of the oligarchy that is the problem. Self appointed elites who don't know that the issues outstrip their ability to understand and analyze the problems that confront us are the problem. They don't recognize the complexity of the issues, so they just keep doing the same crap all over again. Stimulus? Didn't work. So let's re-stimulate. Tax and spend? We're broke. So let's raise taxes. Have a little security problemo at the airline gate? Increase the security procedures. See a trend here? You all have to realize that the solutions to your problems lie in building your own communities and recognizing the gov't is going to be even less capable of meeting your needs. Go introduce yourself to the guy who lives next door - you're gonna need him.
Public employee unions are a curse.
This has nothing at all to do with class warfare. It has everything to do with weak kneed leadership allowing public employee unions to rape the taxpayers.
The only real solution to this problem is to crush public employee unions all together. Bust em up.
And as I said earlier we need to make deep cuts in city,county & state management & administrative level jobs. Council staff, commission staff and so on.
I always thought the county's longevity bonus was ridiculous. $25K+ after 15-20 years? Really? I don't know any private sector employee who isn't C-level to get that kind of compensation. Reform that and tie cost of living increases to the CPI for the west region.
But I still the biggest liability over the county's head is the pensions.
Fire fighters are so over paid in Nevada it is almost impossible to fix. I am against privatization but in this case, it is the only way to fix it. The salaries need to be cut by 50% and the pensions are insane.
(If state workers did have a contract, the Legislature would almost certainly not have been able to institute the furloughs it approved last year, which cut salaries by 4.6 percent and saved $333 million over two years.)
While the figure above is correct, and that was what it was suppossed to save the State, becuase of some Agencies complaining that it was not fair, or they just could not do it, The Gov, Att. Gen, and Sec of State (The Board of Examiners) gave exemptions to certain agencies.
One in particuliar is Nevada Dept of Corrections. This cost the State of 3/4 of the amount of money they "put away" to cover true emergencies.
Why allow the biggest Agency in the State to get away with this, when all other State workers have to take the furlough? If the Dept of Corrections is to retarded to figure out how to do a furlough and pay its fair share, then the State should have just cut DNOC workers 4.6%....
Fair is Fair!!
VOTE OUT ALL INCUMBENTS in the next election cycle
SEIU is a joke, same with all other unions in vegas. Unions are crooks and the only people who want them are lazy individuals who want to be protected for not doing thier job!
Bassman23: You hit the nail on the HEAD! SEIU is a joke.Let's just wait and see how much tolerance the public has for all of this come election time. All of these Unions need to step up. Your comments simply state facts. Good for you!
Do away with collective bargaining. And vote out any incumbent commissioner that allows this ridiculous situation to continue.
THE BIG PICTURE,another attack on the middle class.The middle class that made America, is slowly disappearing. This Depression is splitting our society into TWO. We now have the Rich and the Poor.
Just another example of Darwinism (only the strongest survive). I expect to see more of DARWINISM in the future.
One need only read George Will's column in The Sun today for an affirmation that public agency employees unions can easily destroy a state by outright greed on behalf of their members.
George Will's account of what went on in Sacramento during the last 20 years is entirely consistent with what I saw. California is a failed state, and has been since at least 1996, as exhibited by the abject failure of its public schools, run by their unionized employees.
Here in Nevada, the only thing which will save us from a similar fate is either (A) passage of a State Constitutional amendment banning public employee unions, or (B) the change of Nevada's Legislative majorities, and County Commissioners to those of frugal independents and Republicans.
CCSD is a prime example of the beginning of the end for Nevada. It is profoundly ineffective in educating the vast majority of its students...yet teacher pundits claim that their own union is dominated and manipulated by school district management. I cannot imagine how the CCSD could improve if it had a powerful employees union.
have to run governments like businesses..not a bottomless pit of money.
Cynical Observer thinks republicans do no wrong. All problems can be solved by voting for heros like W Bush and Gibbons. Only fine republicans like Larry Craig and John Ensign are moral enough to lead.
Give it a break man. You are a fox news broken record.
Jim Gibbons started the discussion years ago about wage decreases for 'Public Servants". He tried it last session and go blasted by you people. ?
He has been crucified ever since for it. It takes real leadership to try to solve a problem before it is too big, and that is what he did.
The other clowns running for all pubic offices have been part of the problem. I wish we had more leaders that would stand up to these thugs.
Oscar was part of the decision making that gave them these fat cat wages, so was Rory, so was Mike M., and Brian has no spine to stand up either.
People need to re-check their opinions on their candidates next time so we keep the ONE who fights these tax and spenders vs the puppets. I don't care who is poking who in their personal life, I care who does their job as a leader.
Food for thought...Clark County lost $60 plus million in property tax revenue to the State. The Regional Justice Center had a $38 million dollar cost overrun, and lastly, the County loses millions of dollars in law suits every single year. Given the above, how much of that is the local county employee's fault????? How much? I say again, How much.....ZERO! So we are hitting the county employee, when in fact, we should be hitting who is responsible for this! County Management: Virginia Valentine, Don Burnette, George Stevens, Jeff Wells, Phil Rosenquist, Yolanda King; and County Commissioners, for lack of oversight of these huge projects. Hold these individuals at fault first, hit them in the pocket book and when contracts reopen, I'm sure the unions will be more than happy to concede some things! Thoughts?
Let's go ahead and take away collective bargaining for teachers, fire fighters and police to make it equal to the private sector. But to be really fair and equal, then the public sector without collective bargaining should have the right to strike. If you want equal, then by all means make it equal...but it needs to be equal across the board.
One of the reasons we have police officers is so firemen can have heros too.
Those firefighters couldn't care less about the public welfare. They care more about their coffee at Starbucks. If they made "The Towering Inferno" today they would show the firemen letting the building burn down because they weren't making enough money. UCLA just raised their tuition 30%. They should just let Univ. of Calif. become private. Let them charge $100K for a useless degree to anybody who is dumb enough to pay that much. I'm sure public employees could pay that much easily.
SufferinSuccotash..The only thing union members are good at is pressing ham, taking bribes and coercing public officials. I bet you light a candle for Jimmy Hoffa too.
There was I time were public employees were called public servants. Today the they demand more, earn more, and tell tax payers what to do. The article stated the following:
"For example, the average firefighter in Nevada makes nearly $95,000, or 48 percent than the national average. Local police officers make nearly $79,000, or 30 percent more than the national average."
These figures do not include benefits or overtime. This is a joke. I also want to know who the idiot is that negotiated these contracts and increased city workers pay to these levels.
Bust ALL unions and start over again...
"You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot lift the wage earner up by pulling the wage payer down. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred. You cannot build character and courage by taking away people's initiative and independence. You cannot help people permanently by doing for them, what they could and should do for themselves."
--Abraham Lincoln
cathysthoughts :
Spoken like a true Republican..
CynicalObserver really doesn't get it. Why am I not surprised?
The teacher's union (CTA) is a joke. It has NO power and does next to nothing for the average teacher and even less for education in general.
Teacher's have collective bargaining rights but teacher's can't strike, and that allows the school board to do what ever it wants to do when it comes to negotiating with the union at contract time. More times than not, it's a "take it or leave it" situation for teacher's.
Most of the older and more experienced teachers don't belong to CTA. That has been true for many, many years. In short, they have given up on the union....
Contrary to what many on this board believe, you get what you pay for when it comes to education.....
The demographics of this valley have a great deal to do with the inability of the schools to successfully educated the masses......
With that being said, there's many, many students who receive an excellent eduation in the Clark County School District. The public often hears only about those students who don't achieve; who don't graduate; who can't pass the state competency test, etc.....
If the average tax payer could spend some time at the annual Sun Youth Forum, they would come away very impressed with the quality of many of the students that are graduating from high schools in southern Nevada...
Those kids have it together and their future is very, very bright. Maybe some of them will decide to get involved in the political process....we can only hope!
The number of students who show up at the school house door unable to speak English is increasing yearly. It's very difficult to teach a student who does not speak English such subjects as science, social studies and math.
Nevada ranks near the bottom when it comes to the amount of money spend per student on education. The last time I looked, Nevada ranked 46th or 47th out of the 51 states....Washington, D.C. is, in this case, counted as a state.
I personally believe that fireman are over paid and policeman have NOTHING to complain about when it comes to salary...
Jobs for fireman are at a premium and it's not unusual to see 500 people apply for 15-20 vacancies in the fire department.
More to come.....
Additional thoughts....
I also don't believe that policeman need additional help. I constantly see two, & some times three police vehicles dealing with a very routine traffic stop or minor infraction...
In my mind, they often (but not all of time...) have too little to do! I would never want to be a policeman and I do believe that they some times put their life on the line, but I believe they are paid very well for their services...
To listen to many of the comments made on this board, one might come away with the idea that the number #1 problem that we have in this state is that we have over-paid our state workers and, as a result, that, and that alone, is why we're swimming in a sea of red ink!
If only the problem was that simple.....