Union presents corrected salary-survey, seeks multi-year pay package; city requests costings

Union negotiators presented a corrected salary survey they said covers roughly 22 peer jurisdictions and argued that once incentive pay and other components are added the department ranks well below comparable cities. The union asked for a multi-year pay package to close the gap, framed as phased increases rather than a single-year spike.

The union previewed a multi-year example (presented informally as 15% in year one, then smaller increases in subsequent years) and said the ask is tied to retention and the higher workload caused by local population and service-area characteristics. They asked the city to consider reconfiguring some assignment and incentive pays rather than leaving them siloed.

City budget staff said they need the underlying contracts and a line-item cost analysis. The city asked for a short list of comparator cities, copies of the contracts the union used, and a full cost estimate of any multi-year package, including pension and benefit effects. The union provided copies of some contracts and said it would deliver the corrected survey and the city-costing requests to enable focused discussions at the next session.

Both sides acknowledged that pay increases are the negotiation's most expensive proposals and that phased, targeted approaches or trades (for example, narrowing certain ad pays while boosting base pay) could be part of a compromise. The parties agreed to follow up with detailed costings and a narrower set of comparator benchmarks for a single compensation proposal to take to elected officials for budgeting decisions.