Board of Aldermen 12-26-2018 Page 9
the unions they can just say — no we are not going to do that. And | think a number of us here have sat
and done bargaining with unions around contracts and you have to talk about the reality of what the City
can and cannot afford. With the unaffiliated | just see that as a very different piece in terms of deciding
what goes on. So! am with Alderman Dowd on that, thank you.
Alderman Lopez
| think a lot of ways with the amendment that we’ve added we do allow some Self-determination to be
returned to the employees that are unaffiliated. Because with the amendment we allow them to opt out of
the changes that were initially supported by the Mayor if they have a different configuration which they feel
is of benefit. And that is a configuration that may actually cost us less. So we’ve been talking about the
most extreme possible expense model while that is not necessarily the one that we are going to see.
| also, as you know from my previous comments, | consider the Board of Aldermen to have made the
decision. | understand that the Mayor is standing his ground and that he believes very much in this. | kind
of hoped this wouldn’t have come to a head, maybe 3 ghosts would have visited him on Monday but that
obviously didn’t happen. Maybe he got wore out got tired in Washington but here we are. And as much as
the new information in terms of history has come forward, it is the same argument that we have been
discussing in committee that if we do anything to help amend this, we are opening the door to everything
going wrong from that point onwards.
| think there are two parts of what the Mayor was presenting, part of it is the concern that this may go
further and that is our responsibility as a Board. It was brought up last year and the year before with
regards to the spending cap, we are Aldermen, we were elected to represent people and we can’t just let
things pass right through. So when we have contracts coming forward or we start to see trends, we need
to vet it, we need to do our jobs. | think we did our job with this, | think we did discuss it in Committee
pretty deeply we reached an agreement and we voted on it. Like | said, personally | haven’t heard
anything new or paradigm shaking.
Alderman Caron
Thank you. When this started this was to, what | considered, to set the record straight concerning a group
of people that never should have been left out of the change. They should have been grandfathered along
with everyone else that was non-affiliated. And | understand Alderman Dowd’s comments, but we as a
Board have no control over contracts, other than money. So those governing bodies, the Police
Commission, Fire and School Board, they are in charge of the contracts, they make the decision whether
they are going to make those changes, we don’t. And then we wonder why we have so many unions,
because some of these things are done arbitrarily across the board and they have no recourse.
We didn’t have unions for secretaries and things like that before, but those came about because they were
always getting what they considered the short end of the stick. | have to agree with Alderman Lopez, we
passed this 12 to 2 a couple of weeks ago and | thought that we were going to move forward. And as
Alderman Lopez said, not everyone is going to take that, they are going to look at what they have for sick
leave and think maybe their 20% is better than the maximum of 720, if you took the time to look at some of
those employees, some had very little accumulated sick leave. So either they are very sick or they take
their time and that’s fine too so you are not looking at $300,000.00. You are looking a long-time, 10 to 15
year time.
When | think about some of the expenses we’ve had and one in particular that is moving forward, | think it
is going to end up costing up more money than we thought. But that is something we have to look at
moving forward. So we can beat this to death or we can move forward and vote one way or the other and
put this to rest. Thank you.
President Wilshire
This is on the Motion to re-refer.
