In the six months he’s helmed the Police Department, Chief Roderick Porter has engineered a spirit of goodwill within the rank and file his predecessor could not. The latest is a new police contract in which Mayor Joe Ganim has agreed to reduce the cost of health insurance contribution that police insiders say was a detriment to recruitment and spurred defections.
In an election year, Ganim’s hoping for stability within the police ranks and improved relations that’s been a bumpy road the past several years. Ganim returned to the mayoralty in 2015 with the heavy backing of the police union.
From Brian Lockhart, CT Post:
Just short of two years after their previous contract expired, members of the city’s police union in a close vote Tuesday accepted a new five-year pact intended to help lure more recruits to the depa with Mayor Joe Ganim’s administration, which will now head to the all-Democrat City Council for review and final approval, provides a 14 percent total raise — three percent for the first four years, two percent for the fifth — and reduces the cost of health insurance.
That latter change, Police Chief Roderick Porter, his predecessor, Acting Chief Rebeca Garcia and union leadership for months claimed, is necessary to both attract new officers and keep existing ones from transferring to other municipalities for better benefits.
More specifically, a decade ago under then-Mayor Bill Finch, a Democrat like Ganim, Bridgeport’s municipal workers hired after Jan. 1, 2012 began paying more for their health care premiums, starting at 25 percent and increasing 1 percent annually to a maximum 50 percent cap. The intent was to shift the burden from taxpayers to the workers.
The new police contract rolls back the clock for those hired after Jan. 1, 2012 to again start that contribution at 25 percent, then raise it 1 percent per year to a reduced cap of 33.34 percent.
Full story here
Seems like a decent raise for the men and women that protect the city. Anybody calculate the total fiscal impact? I just quickly ran the cost of similar well deserved raises for teachers raises only and in year one would exceed the total increase of the city share by 900k (3.45 million). Similar raises over 5 years would cost around 18.5 million dollars.
Yet we would still have the city bean counters ask if you got 18.5 million over 5 years what would you do with it? Umm pay staff.
All BOE, and city employees deserve raises however starvation of education funding by the current mayor makes it impossible and miraculously all the city side departments get nice contract settlements in an election year.