Contract negotiations between Redwood City and its firefighters are coming to a close after more than a year of back and forth largely focused on retirement health benefits and the city’s unstable financial footing.
“It definitely has been longer than normal and longer than ideal but I feel really good actually with where we landed and I think it was good for the bargaining groups and the community as a whole,” City Manager Melissa Stevenson-Diaz said. “This has been an extraordinarily difficult time for our employees in the fire department who have been on front lines during the earliest darkest days of the pandemic until now continuously and excellently.”
Come Monday, the Redwood City Council will be asked to pass an updated labor contract with the city’s Chief Officers Association and the San Mateo County Firefighters International Association of Fire Fighters Local 2400.
IAFF members recently voted unanimously to ratify the two-year contract which provides firefighters with two 2% raises annually and includes a retroactive equity raise of 3% for December pay. Officers are slated to receive 3% raises annually under their three-year contract that will also begin retroactively starting Oct. 1 and extending through September of 2024.
The retroactive pay will be granted in a lump sum costing the city $300,000 and the total cost for the agreement will add about $925,000 to the city budget annually. But the city earned its own concessions under the agreement, specifically around retirement health care offerings.
Current employees who retire due to physical injury receive health care into perpetuity along with their relatives. But those offerings to relatives will be reduced to four years of coverage for new employees and new employees will pay just more than 1% of their pay to the industrial disability retirement health care benefit.
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Growing pension liabilities and retirement health benefits have strained the city budget which has stumbled due to more than $82 million of losses caused by the pandemic, Stevenson-Diaz said. Employee vacancies in all city departments have helped with cost savings but projections still indicate a slow financial recovery, forcing city officials to balance employee stress with budgetary constraints, she said.
Now on the other end of negotiations, Stevenson-Diaz said she’s happy to say all vacancies in the fire department have now been filled and additional hiring has been authorized. But positions in other departments remain vacant resulting in increased stress for city employees.
“Are we providing services in the best ways we can and are using best practices,” Stevenson-Diaz said. “We still have more work to do to make sure we’re on the same page about services and trade-offs.”
The City Council will meet in City Hall at 6 p.m. Monday, May 23, and will be streamed live at redwoodcity.org and on Comcast Channel 27 and AT&T U-verse Channel 99. Remote public comments will be received by telephone during the meeting, prior to the close of public comment on an item. *67 (669) 900-6833, Meeting ID: 949 6945 8344.
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