Police Union Negotiations

It's been a bit of a rough year, as our police department unions have been working without a contract since October 1, 2007. Despite this internal unrest, our police personnel have continued to serve the residents, businesses and guests of Sylvania Township to their highest ability and I appreciate and respect their dedication to our community.

During the past year, we have been diligently negotiating with all three police unions, but the process has been long as there were numerous issues that we had to address in order to increase the efficiency and cost effectiveness of the police department, while maintaining the quality service that our community expects.

Certainly, working without a contract is not necessarily conducive to productive labor-management relationships. It was not a situation that I was pleased with, but clearly we have to have a union contract structure that allows us to make the management decisions necessary to operate the police department in the best interests of the public.

But the final outcome of the union negotiations resulted in 3.0-3.5% raises for each of the next two years (plus one year retroactive); in addition, there was a $1500 signing bonus. In exchange, we have the right to implement a more cost effective health insurance plan (an 80-20 plan as compared to our current 100%/fully-insured plan) with employee contributions of 10% (up from about 2.5%) and more management flexibility in manning levels and shift supervision. We were denied our requests to set up more flexible shifts and to change the disciplinary process to a structure that would be more respectful of individual personnel.

I don't view contract negotiations as a win-win type of things; we all lose something. But hopefully now that the process is over, we can get past the unfortunate consequence of being on opposite sides of the bargaining table and focus all of our energies on providing efficient and effective safety services.