10 WEEKLYPRESS.COM · UCREVIEW.COM · AUGUST 08 · 2012


OP-ED: PICA: Reject City’s Spending Plan


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without a projected deficit for the current fiscal year and the life of the Five-Year Plan. But, there is no way that one can look at the spending assump- tions surrounding the City’s municipal workforce and declare them reasonable. That is why PICA must reject the Plan and return it to the Mayor for revisions that will bring the Plan into balance.


Just weeks ago, a


three-person arbitra- tion panel issued an award for City firefighters which provided for wage in- creases and additional funding for health


benefits from 2009 to 2013. This award closely mirrored a 2010 arbitration award, which was ap- pealed by the Mayor, who contended the award failed to take into consideration the City’s ability to afford the increases (the ar- bitration is supposed to use this as a factor in making its deter- mination). The Mayor estimates the cost of this arbitration award at approximately $200 million, which is defi- nitely not part of the City’s spending plan. Now the Mayor is re-appealing the deci- sion and the firefight- ers’ union is suing to implement the award


and the budget hangs in limbo.


If the arbitration


award is upheld, the Five-Year Plan is in the red. Even if the City wins its appeal on the cur- rent contract and the arbitration award is reconsidered, the fire- fighters are due a new contract next year. Po- lice officers are also due a new contract, and City white- and blue-collared employ- ees have been work- ing without a contract for years and deserve a contract that takes into account increases in the cost of living (not to mention the increased cost of City taxes).


This is certainly not to say that it is impos- sible to re-engineer our governmental ser- vices or to right-size our governmental approach to agency spending. It is clear that government can be more efficient and more effective in ser- vice-delivery efforts, but the City’s Five- Year Plan makes no suggestion that such large-scale efforts are underway.


It is simply incon- ceivable that Philadel- phia will somehow make it through the next five years, not only without a single extra dollar being spent on increased costs for our mu-


nicipal workforce, but with “anticipated workforce savings” of nearly $50 million over the next five years. Even if it were possible to believe that Mayor Nutter could achieve these savings and avoid any future costs dur- ing his mayoralty, it is certainly not prudent to believe that we can forecast similar achievements into the next Mayor’s tenure, which will commence before the end of this Five-Year Plan. Years ago, I lauded Mayor Nutter for his approach to account- ing for increases in workforce costs by explicitly including a reserve for wage and benefit increases in his first Five-Year Plan:


“By putting forth an amount for future union pay and benefit increases, the Nutter administration es- sentially says, ‘here’s what the city can af- ford…if we are to pay more, we will have to change our budget priorities.’...Such an approach should help focus union nego- tiations on creating labor-management consensus on a way to deliver quality city services at reasonable costs.”


The current Five-


Year Plan includes no such reserve and with the arbitration panels consistently awarding contracts with costs for uniformed em- ployees -- and with no productive nego- tiations underway to generate savings in new agreements with white- and blue- collared employees -- its workforce-cost assumptions must be rejected. PICA should return this plan to the Mayor so he can incorporate contingencies to show how he will account for these increased costs. Even better, he should sit down at the bargaining table and negotiate deals to create certainty for Philadelphia’s finan- cial future. http://brettmandel. com/content/pica- reject-citys-spending- plan.


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