Point Austin: One Last Chance

The political honeymoon may not be entirely over, but today (Feb. 5) the new City Council is scheduled to address its first truly contentious (and long-festering) policy issue: Aus­tin Fire Department hiring. The special-called meeting has a few items, but will centrally consider a resolution proposed by District 4 Coun­cil Mem­ber Greg Casar that would withdraw the pending Request for Proposals from vendors for a hiring process, and direct city management to resume previously suspended negotiations with the Austin Fire­fight­ers Associations. Under the resolution as drafted, should those negotiations fail to produce a process for a both highly qualified and racially diverse class of applicants, the city would return to its current plan for its own process, under the consent decree imposed last year by the U.S. Department of Justice.

Since the consent decree, by definition, is supposed to protect the rights of minority applicants – severely underrepresented in the current AFD – it's significant that Casar's resolution is co-sponsored by four minority CMs: The others are Ora Houston (D1), Delia Garza (D2), and Pio Renteria (D3). Garza is also a former firefighter, and argues that while it's right for the city to be concerned about institutional racism, "If I thought, for any reason, that [the proposal] was about keeping minorities out, or women out, I would be the first person to be against it. I know it's not about that." She says firefighters are particularly concerned about hiring not only because of the difficulty and danger of the job, but because at times they literally live together. Beyond that, she says, "I think it's important for everyone to go back to the table, and for the firefighters to feel heard, and to feel part of the decision-making process."

Brand New Council

Additional Council members have offered to co-sponsor, and barring some surprise, the proposal should pass easily. But there has been steady resistance from city management, which last year persuaded the previous Council to reject even a one-week delay in accepting the DOJ consent decree (see "Point Austin: Fixing What Ain't Broke," May 23, 2014). Last-ditch legal memos have been flying that reportedly suggest that withdrawing the RFP (even temporarily) would violate the consent decree. (Garza, an attorney, says she can find no such provision in the decree.)

I asked former CM (and former AFA president) Mike Martinez what had changed since last May, when he and Chris Riley were the sole votes briefly to delay the decree. "It's a brand new City Council. ... In the old Council, that specific vote, the advice from the manager far outweighed what the firefighters tried to tell us at the time." Martinez also credited the AFA with spending time and energy educating the incoming Council members on the history and detail of the subject.

For his part, AFA President Bob Nicks says he's "exuberant" about the proposal. "Council has done a really good job in terms of appropriate roles for all the stakeholders, and making sure it's not too heavy-handed either way. It sets up an environment in which we should be able to negotiate, and we're expecting a quick negotiation – 60 days – in which we can solve these issues that have taken so long to solve."

Work It Out

Casar told me that his previous career at Workers Defense Project addressed "the intersection of racial justice and labor rights ... specifically because immigrants and other minorities were not being included by the labor movement. I want to give the AFA the opportunity to change that, and I want the city to give them that opportunity as well." He argues that eventually the city and the union will have to bargain successfully, and the two sides shouldn't wait to make the attempt until the consent decree expires. "This has been an issue that's been fraught for too many years," Casar said. "I want the parties to have one last chance to sit down and try to work it out, with the baseline that this City Council is going to be the arbiter of whether or not the conversations are had in good faith."

There's no guarantee that Justice will sign off on the proposal – although it should not interfere even with the timing of new hires, anticipated for the fall. There's even less guarantee that the two sides, after years of mutual mistrust and impasse on this issue, won't founder on the same rocks. But after many failed attempts, it was the union that devised a hiring process (in 2013) that resulted in the most diverse class in department history. It seems only rational to attempt to replicate that success.

Writing to his colleagues, Casar summarized his purpose: "My intention with this resolution is to create the conditions for a successful bargaining process that will result in more racial diversity, great new firefighters, and the positive labor-management relations that we need to move forward." Since all the parties insist they share those laudable goals, the city should indeed give the process one last shot.