Board of Aldermen
February 23, 2016 Page 17
tall pole everything else we could accept or reject but it’s somewhat irrelevant financially for the most part. |
would strongly urge that this Board vote for a contract even though like many of us we are not entirely happy
with the numbers.
Alderman O’Brien
My last statement on this matter in support is something nobody here has brought up and you have different
unions within the police department and one of them is the Patrolmen’s Association and eventually in time they
come in and they bring in their contract and we approve or disapprove and they come up but it’s the fact that
it's called compression and it very much exists. When you bring in the patrolmen’s contract it comes in and it
compresses against the supervisor’s contract and it eventually gets to the point that you say here and some
people threw the blanket statement out that maybe there’s no big reason but when you have a compression on
the salaries coming up from the bottom from the patrolmen’s it can go against the “why would you really want
to become a supervisor if you are making almost the same basic pay grade” and that’s something that | don’t
have an answer for without looking at a comparison but it’s something that | think we need to be aware of. The
reason that the supervisor's come in with the dollar amount that they are looking for is to guard against that
compression factor.
| would also like to thank Attorney Bennett for his service but also for one of his last rulings and | do agree with
you, thank you.
Alderman Dowd
| did talk to Chief Lavoie and as was stated earlier he fully supports this contract and fully understands the cost
of the contract as part of his budget and has already allocated that into it. He feels strongly that the support of
his leadership team is vitally important to his department. | think we ought to pass this contract.
Alderman Schoneman
| voted for this contract in the Budget Review Committee because of its inevitability and | don’t see any point in
not supporting it now. | asked Chief Lavoie if this was going to be contained within their 1.3% spending cap
number and then we find out that it’s 2.5%. So, yes it is included in a budget number that is double what the
spending cap allows. At some stage if you are given enough anything can be covered. It’s a painful support
because it paints us into a corner and it’s going to cause us trouble later.
Alderman Siegel
In addressing Alderman O’Brien’s roll up your sleeves remark, there is one way we can save significant
amounts of money for our police department and that’s that you can negotiate with the criminals and you can
see if they might be willing to do less crimes because then we would have less expense. So there’s a way that
you can direct your energy.
A Viva Voce Roll Call vote was taken which resulted as follows:
Yea: Alderman Clemons, Alderman Dowd, Alderman Caron, 9
Alderman Siegel, Alderman Schoneman, Alderman LeBrun,
Alderman O’Brien, Alderman Lopez, Alderman McCarthy
Nay: Alderman Deane, Alderman Cookson, Alderman McGuinness, 6
Alderman Moriarty
MOTION CARRIED
Resolution R-16-009 declared duly adopted.
