The union representing 48 Darien police officers ratified a four-year contract with the town that increases wages 2 percent in the first year and 2.5 percent in the next three and eliminates unused sick time for new employees.
All members of the bargaining unit will be moved into a high-deductible health insurance plan ($2,000 for the employee or $4,000 for the employee’s family of two people or more).
The police union ratified the contract on Wednesday, Sept. 30, and the Board of Selectmen is scheduled to vote on it on Monday. The Representative Town Meeting’s approval will be needed before the contract goes into effect.
The previous union contract expired on June 30, 2014, and negotiations on this one continued after that. Police will get a retroactive payment for first year of the contract, and part of this one.
The contract expires June 30, 2018 (a year after the recently approved contract for town Department of Public Works employees).
“By way of comparison, the wage rate for the retro year of the contract (2014-2015) is consistent with the statewide average for arbitration awards and negotiated settlements for that year (2.18 percent and 2.36 percent respectively),” W. Lee Palmer, the town’s personnel director, said in a memorandum dated Thursday, Oct. 1 (the full memo is attached to this article in several images).
“The three remaining years of the contract […] are consistent within the range of statewide negotiated settlements, which have seen seen settlements topping out at 2.66 percent,” Palmer wrote.
“[T]opping out” appears to indicate that the highest percentage increase in negotiated union salaries was 2.66 percent, suggesting that this agreement is not the highest in the state.
Palmer’s memo says nothing about average negotiated salaries and how this contract compares to them.
Similarly, Palmer’s memo says nothing about the overall cost to the town of the contract, either as a whole or for any particular fiscal year. It says only:
“The cost of the wage settlement for FY14-15 and FY15-16 are well within the amount reserved in the budget for contract settlements.”
Most employees are at the top step of the wage scale, Palmer said.
His memo was released by the First Selectman’s Office late Thursday afternoon along with documents regularly sent to news organizations before the next Board of Selectmen meeting. The next one is scheduled for Monday.
“An employee who calls in sick, excluding family sick, will be ineligible for any overtime, special detail or extra-duty job assignments for a minimum of sixteen (16) hours from the end of the shift that the employee called in sick,” according to the memo.
All employees will move into a high-deductible health plan by July 1, 2016, and other (more expensive) health plans will no longer be offered by that date.
Based on current rates of enrollment, “the savings to the town exceeds $25,000,” Palmer wrote, although he didn’t specify what period of time that covered.
“The high deductible plan bends the cost curve to curb the rate of future premium growth,” he wrote.