Long Beach Council Takes Tough Stance in Volatile Contract Talks With Police Union

LONG BEACH —  City officials have again extended bargaining talks with the police union, while warning that they will carry out their threat of imposing a new contract if a settlement is not reached soon in the labor dispute.

The City Council first indicated two weeks ago that it was on the verge of declaring an impasse and adopting its version of a new contract with the 610-member police union, a move that would propel the contract fight into court and underscore the mounting animosity between the two sides.

But at the advice of city staff, the council Tuesday gave negotiators another week to reach a settlement.

“If something doesn’t happen within the next week, we are going to have to deal with the issue,” Mayor Ernie Kell said to a packed council chamber overflowing with police officers in and out of uniform.

Declared Vice Mayor Wallace Edgerton: “We’re getting close to the end of the line and that’s a fact.”

The council has adopted an unusually hard line in the negotiations, siding with management’s demands for major changes in the Police Department’s personnel policies. Three bargaining sessions in the last two weeks yielded little movement on those key negotiating points, according to city officials.

Police union President Mike Tracy welcomed the week’s extension, saying it would help keep the “lid on potentially a very volatile situation in this city.”

He also insisted that if management imposes a new contract on his union, the city would be violating its labor agreement. “We would consider it the terms and conditions of imprisonment.”

Tracy later dismissed the council’s comments as “posturing for negotiations,” and said management was unrealistically expecting the union to abandon personnel policies it had won over the span of many years and many labor contracts.

“It’s unreasonable for them to expect we are going to give back in one negotiating (season) everything we negotiated for in the past 20 years.”

While the city says it is offering handsome raises in return for the take-aways, Tracy said the city was not offering enough.

Management claims it needs a number of changes in the contract to efficiently run the department: The police chief wants unlimited authority to transfer officers from one assignment to another, the ability to send out one-officer, rather than two-officer cars on night shifts, and the right to assign officers to a five-day rather than a four-day week.

The labor standoff and the city’s threat of imposing a new contract have bred enormous discontent within the department, Tracy said. “(Officers) are extremely hostile. There is an anger and frustration level I have never seen in this department.”

Nonetheless, Tracy said, the union’s board of directors continues to oppose a walkout or other job action.