San Jose’s city worker unions are joining together to insist city leaders address the mess that is Measure B and not put it off until 2017, as the Liccardo administration is suggesting. As one union negotiator put it “these groups have no interest in kicking the can down the road and are looking for a public acknowledgement from the city that 2015 is the year to resolve all outstanding issues.”
City officials wanted to extend to 2017 the implementation of the part of Measure B that calls for employees to make an additional 4% contribution of salary to their retirement plans or take a 4% pay cut. The City’s unions were unanimous in refusing to agree to the extension.
In the meantime, the City of San Jose is on the hook for more than $1 Million in attorneys’ fees to be paid to just a few of the unions that sued over the Measure B pension reform fiasco. Judge Patricia Lucas ruled the effort to dismantle employee vested rights was in fact unconstitutional and illegal, as city unions said all along, before the measure was passed more than two years ago.
San Jose has already spent millions unsuccessfully fighting the city unions’ objection to the Measure.
Yesterday, the San Jose City Council voted to extend its contract with the firm of Renne, Sloan, Holtzman, Sakai which led it down the Measure B path in the first place. Council member Don Rocha, absent from the meeting for a family matter, nevertheless left a memo urging his colleagues to reconsider spending $655,000 already set aside for law firm to work on negotiating open contracts for 11 of the city’s bargaining units. In his memo, Rocha questioned the wisdom of continuing with a law firm to work on negotiations where they’ve not had success in the last four years. Council member Magdalena Carrasco was also absent, and Council member Ash Kalra was the lone dissent to throwing good money after bad.
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