Members of New Haven Fire Fighters Local 825 have voted overwhelmingly to approve a two-year extension of their contract through June 30, 2018.
The 203 – 34 vote means that the the proposed extension needs just one more approval to become a reality: a vote by the Board of Alders.
The Harp administration agreed to extend the fire union’s contract two years in return for a change in the scoring of promotional exams and a truce over the hiring of the 911 call center’s chief.
Details of the pact include:
• Increasing the weight given to the oral portion of promotional tests for lieutenant and captain, from 40 to 65 percent, based on the recommendations of an outside consultant. The Harp administration sought the change as a way to help promote more firefighters and address a broader shortage of firefighters and supervisors. (The department is nearly 100 firefighters short, greatly increasing overtime costs.) How to weight tests has been a long-running controversy in the department, the subjects of numerous lawsuits. African-American applicants have generally performed better on oral portions than on written portions of promotional tests.
• Extending the contract, currently set to expire on June 30, 2016, to June 30, 2018. (Click here to read about the current contract.)
• Increasing pay 2.5 percent each of the new two years.
• Extending by a year the current amount (65 percent) that the city contributes to firefighters’ health savings accounts. That percentage had been set to drop to 50 percent next year.
• Ending a dispute over the administration’s hiring of firefighter Michael Briscoe to head the joint police-fire emergency call center.
While the contract itself didn’t spark controversy, the negotiation process did, raising allegations that fire Union President Jimmy Kottage tried to obtain a personal six-figure pension deal along the way. Kottage denied he ever sought the deal as part of the official negotiations. The executive board of the union (including Kottage) subsequently voted to authorize an internal investigation into those charges. (Read more about that here.) “I welcomed and voted for the authorizing of an internal investigation,” Kottage said this week. He said statements attributed to another board member, that government law-enforcement agencies might be consulted, were “false and defamatory.”