Boston city councilors voted unanimously to approve a 29 percent pay hike for the city’s 277 police detectives — just before they sent a letter warning public safety unions and the mayor that the city cannot continue to foot the bill for such lavish raises.
The measure will cost the city $22.8 million for the period covered by the contract — July 1, 2010 to June 30, 2016. The raise was decided by an arbitrator.
The councilors noted in their letter to Mayor Martin Walsh and the heads of the public safety unions that other city employees get by on much smaller raises and the city cannot afford hefty hikes.
“The trend of escalating public safety salary increases threatens the long-term financial stability of the City of Boston,” Council President Michelle Wu and Councilor Mark Ciommo warned in the letter.
The letter said the council approved the detectives’ raise to be fair to the union after the council signed off on a 25 percent raise for Boston patrolmen in 2013.
However, today’s approval should not “obscure our concern that this level of pay increase is not sustainable for the City’s finances and our expectation for different outcomes in the next round of contract negotiations,” states the letter, signed by all members of the council,
The letter warned that the council will “look with an exceptionally critical eye at any future arbitration awards” and will hire outside experts to scrutinize the awards to figure out whether they are affordable.
Large raises for cops and firefighters are “unsustainable” “without creating huge gulf between civil employees and public safety employees,” Ciommo said.
The letter has been sent to Walsh, Patrolmen’s Association President Patrick Rose, Police Superior Officer Federation President Mark Parolin, Police Detectives Benevolent Society President Brian Black, and Fire Fighters Association Richard Paris.
“We value all of our city employees, and we have to recognize what is affordable to the city,” Ciommo said. “We are a small and financially sound city. … It’s about how we balance all of our needs and all of the services of the city of Boston.”
Speaking before the vote, the mayor said he was disappointed the contract went to arbitration.
"Certainly the last thing I wanted to do was to go to arbitration," Walsh said. "When I ran for mayor I made a statement that I didn't want to go to arbitration ever again. In this particular case, we were taken to arbitration.
I felt at the time there was a good, fair contract on the table. Unfortunately, we weren't able to come to an agreement and the arbiter didn't see it our way. But I certainly know in the future that we're not going to tolerate excessive arbitration awards anymore."
The mayor noted that he has sought to break a yearslong pattern, dating back to former Mayor Thomas M. Menino's administration, of steep arbitration awards to public safety unions.
"This has been a cycle going back about seven or eight years now in this city, and this is the last one that's there," he said. "We're going to go into open minds and open conversation in the next contracts. We were able to solve in the first hundred days of my administration, able to settle six contracts, including a firefighters contract and an EMS contract (without going to arbitration). My intention is to get the police contracts and the firefighter contracts done in a timely manner."
