City Council heard an update last Thursday on the breakdown in the city’s meet-and-confer negotiations with the Austin-Travis County EMS Association. City Labor Relations staff was on hand to explain to Council why they’d come back with no agreement. By the end of the session, after impassioned pleas from EMS Chief Ernie Rodriguez and ATCEMSA President Tony Marquardt, and a fiscal reality check from interim City Manager Elaine Hart, the dais appeared poised to send the two sides back to the table – potentially as soon as this Thursday’s Council meeting.
The 80-minute briefing began with Council hearing how the proposed pay increases compared to other Fire and EMS departments in the state. When CMs expressed concern that there weren’t any specific comparables to other standalone EMS departments, a Labor Relations representative said there exists no perfect comparable: Due to differences in rank, training, and duties, it’s difficult to evaluate pay between departments. There’s also trouble extrapolating the comparisons beyond the first or second year of the contract due to lack of data on what the outcome of contracts in other jurisdictions might be.
“Paramedics are like doctors,” offered CM Delia Garza, a former firefighter. “They’re the ones that intubate the patients. They start IVs; they push drugs; they decide what drugs to push. It is a very different job than a basic EMT, basic Fire job. I don’t think this is a fair comparison, and I would really urge us to support going back to the table and trying to come to an agreement. Because this current situation does not help the morale of a department that I feel like doesn’t get the attention and the respect that it should.”
At present, the City Manager’s Office does not have the financial flexibility this cycle to meet the union’s demands.
On the heels of those remarks, Chief Rodriguez addressed the dais. “I don’t know if I need to say this, but I’m gonna: We have two Austins,” he said, his voice breaking through the microphone. “We have a happy and weird and beautiful Austin, but we have another Austin. And in the other Austin, people are desperate. Equality is a daily struggle for them. It’s their daily fight – against disease, substance abuse, trafficking, and all of the ugly stuff we read about in the news. My medics are being assaulted more. They’re getting beaten up on scene. They’re getting threatened. They’re getting shot at. They’re highly skilled, highly trained, young, spunky – they have attitude. And they go out there every day and they face it: the other Austin that most of us don’t want to know about.”
Hart noted that at present the City Manager’s Office does not have the financial flexibility this cycle to meet the association’s demands. She said she didn’t believe the union was willing to make significant enough concessions for there to be a realistic possibility of a deal, and said she therefore instructed the Labor Relations team to abandon talks. If Council would like to readjust its budget priorities, it will have to make that decision. “Even if they reduced [the request by] $1 million, I would still have to dip into reserves – one-time money – to pay for an ongoing contract cost,” she explained. “I could not recommend that.”
Despite that admonition, several of Garza’s colleagues, including Greg Casar, Ann Kitchen, Leslie Pool, and Jimmy Flannigan, also showed a desire to get the two sides talking again. There’s now a resolution on the Nov. 9 Council agenda, sponsored by Garza, Pool, Kitchen, and Mayor Steve Adler, directing Hart to go back to the table.
This article appears in November 10 • 2017.