Take a pay cut for two years or accept layoffs.

The choice is simple for the Jacksonville Association of Firefighters this week when the members vote on a new contract that would run through 2012.

If the 1,200 firefighters turn down the deal, about 20 jobs will be gone the next day.

Managers will be demoted and the dominos will fall until most of the new recruits who graduated from the fire academy in July will be without jobs.

And the vote is as crucial as any one point to date in Mayor John Peyton’s plan to reduce the city’s employee costs — something he says is paramount for the city going forward.

“It will be historic and unprecedented,” Peyton said, “if we are successful.”

If not, concessions with the city’s powerful public safety unions get farther away as Peyton draws closer to the end of his time in City Hall.

“They don’t control the clock,” Peyton said.

But neither does the mayor, as evidenced by the city’s struggle to get a hearing date with a magistrate on the police union impasse. The two sides went to impasse in April.

A hearing is now set for mid-December — eight months later.

If it takes that long with the firefighters, voters will have already chosen a new mayor.

And as much as police union President Nelson Cuba thinks each deal should stand on its own, he admits firefighters voting to take pay cuts cranks up the heat on his 2,300-member union.

“It puts the pressure on us to just do what everyone else is doing,” Cuba said.

Neither fire union President Randy Wyse nor Peyton said he can predict how the vote will go.

Wyse said he and union leadership think the best decision is to take the deal, but it’s up to the members now.

Peyton says the contract isn’t getting any better.

“The deal on the table is far superior to the alternative,” Peyton said.

Goal was saving jobs

Negotiations with all of the city’s six unions began a year ago, with Peyton gunning for 3 percent pay cuts.

One by one, talks stalled and ended in impasse.

Except for the fire union.

This spring, the city needed to patch a $12.5 million hole by the end of the year and unveiled plans to take fire engines out of service and demote more than two dozen fire supervisors. The end result would be nearly the entire class of new fire recruits losing their jobs in July.

That sped talks with the fire union and, eventually, the goal of saving those jobs is what led Wyse to strike a tentative deal.

Three other unions followed suit, getting the exact same deal as the firefighters: temporary 2 percent pay cuts and employees, who already pay for family health coverage, picking up 5 percent of their personal premiums.

Two of those unions — one for supervisors and another for blue-collar workers — have already ratified their deals.

But the fire proposal has been seemingly held together with chewing gum and paper clips from the moment it was signed.

Police union on spot

Two weeks after, Peyton mentioned Wyse by name in his budget address to the City Council, saying he appreciated the cooperation from the fire union leaders. Then in his next breath, Peyton scolded the police union for not being a part of the solution.

Cuba pounced on the perception that Wyse was caving in to the mayor and held a meeting for firefighters at his union hall, urging them to turn down the deal because they didn’t know what they were voting on.

The deal had been contingent on a pension reform deal with the Police and Fire Pension Fund, but that piece has been pulled.

The Police and Fire Pension Fund has agreed to study Peyton’s plan that would increase the years of service needed to retire.

It would change a program that allows workers to pick their retirement day five years out and put money they would have drawn as a pension in an 8.4-percent interest-bearing account.

Those moves are the key financial cogs in a plan that Peyton says would save the city $700 million to $800 million over 35 years.

The fire union was hung up on some of the contract language tying the pay contract to pension reform, so the city pulled it to expedite a vote. The city does include an incentive related to pension reform — the guarantee against fire department layoffs would go from September 2011 to September 2012 if the pension board eventually agrees to the deal.

Cuba said this week he’ll be watching the fire vote, but doesn’t think it should matter.

Asked if he’d advocate for the same deal for his members, Cuba said he couldn’t answer because the police and corrections officers have yet to get the same offer.

Other cities in same boat

Nationally, governments are pressing for pension and pay cuts from unions — with public safety seemingly in the crosshairs the most.

Cities and counties across Florida are in the same boat, using the same pool of magistrates whose schedules have tightened as union after union heads to impasse.

Miami firefighters and police officers are getting pay cuts between 5 and 12 percent, depending on how much they make.

In Dallas police and fire agreed to five unpaid days off, freezing tenure-based raises and exchanging overtime pay for compensation time in most cases.

All Jacksonville employees are being asked to pitch in, Councilman Stephen Joost said, and the complaint from public safety employees that they are being singled out is untrue.

“Two percent is not that much to give up to keep everybody employed,” he said.

On the advice from city attorneys, council members have said little about the police union contract in which they may eventually have a large role.

If either the city or the police union rejects what the magistrate comes up with, the council then crafts the contract.

There’s certainly a hope that a “yes” vote from the fire union brings the Fraternal Order of Police closer to concessions, Joost said, but no one is banking on it.

Peyton remains confident cuts will be made — one way or another.

“At the end of the day, there will be reform,” Peyton said. “It’s just a matter of how we get there.”

matt.galnor@jacksonville.com, (904) 359-4550

link: http://jacksonville.com/news/metro/2010-09-19/story/fire-contract-v...