Markeshia Ricks Photo
Cotto along with police union members on the steps of 1 Union Ave.
The city’s police union Friday charged that the city is holding up contract negotiations and possibly violating off-the-record negotiating rules.
Officer Florencio Cotto Jr., the current president of New Haven Elm City Local, stood on the steps of 1 Union Ave. Friday afternoon flanked by about 40 of his union members and two of the union’s attorney and made that case at a press conference called in response to one held a day earlier by Mayor Toni Harp.
“It is not my intention to attack the mayor,” Cotto said. “However, many of the statements made at the press conference yesterday are simply inaccurate, and the union negotiating committee believes that it is important to correct the public record.”
The police have been working without a contract for three years. It is now in binding arbitration with the city, while cops flee the force for higher pay in suburban departments or retire to preserve health and pension benefits they fear might be eroded.
Harp accused the police union of refusing to try to return to the table rather than continue with arbitration, and claimed that the city offered the union an opportunity to settle the contract back in April 2017 but was met with no response.
“The truth is the union asked the city to give us its last best offer which if rejected would result in going to arbitration,” Cotto said. The city made an “off the record last best offer” and put it in writing. That was the offer that the membership overwhelmingly rejected.
“We took the mayor at her word that it was the best she could do by way of settlement, and proceeded to arbitration,” Cotto said.
The union let the mayor know that they believed that they could continue to negotiate even while in arbitration, Cotto said. In discussions between city and union attorneys since the contract has been in arbitration, Cotto said, the union has expressed desires to keep talking but indicated that there was a particular proposal that the union would not accept unless it was modified. The city was supposed to respond but “they never did,” he said.
The union president also challenged the mayor’s characterization of the proportion of white and minority officers leaving the force. Harp said Thursday that the number of cops leaving is proportionate to their representation on the force.
“The undisputed fact is the New Haven Police Department is losing officers of all color,” he said but he said the mayor is inaccurate when it comes to how quickly it is losing minority officers. “So far this year, six of nine” of the officers who have left the department for a job somewhere else — not including retirements — were black and Hispanic officers, he said.
Cotto also went on to say that the union believes that the city’s lawyer handling the negotiations, Floyd Dugas, might have violated off the record negotiations when he said that the offer the city made to the union was nearly identical to what was offered to Waterbury and Bridgeport police officers.
“What Mr. Dumas probably meant to say is that the recent Waterbury settlement, as the last interest arbitration award, contained an average raise of 2.76 percent a year,” Cotto said. “The union will not respond to this other than to say that if the union were to accept the most recent settlement, our wages would be the poorest of the poorest municipalities in the state of Connecticut.”
New Haven police officers last had a 3 percent raise in 2015, according to documents provided by union attorney Stephen McElney. The city proposal that is currently in arbitration would offer no retroactive raise for the three years that the department has been without a contract, and a 2 percent raise in 2019 and 2020, he said. Both Bridgeport and Waterbury are giving some retroactive raises. They also pay their officers more than New Haven and would continue to do so under their new contracts, he said.
The union said the city’s most recent offer would make New Haven cops the lowest paid among Connecticut’s 12 poorest cities.
Cotto noted the mayor ender her press conference with the statement, “We want a deal.”
“So does Elm City Local leadership and membership,” he said. He further added that the union is preparing a new off the record deal, which he said it was in the process of doing before the mayor called her press conference Thursday.
“We look forward to meeting with the mayor’s representative and should she decide to attend for the first time, the mayor as well,” he said.
In response, Mayor Harp Friday said the city, too, is eager to “move this process forward” and reach a deal.
She rebutted Cotto’s version of events so far: She said the numbers she was referring to about cops leaving the force go back a year, not just to the most recent nine departures. She also noted that suburbs like Hamden and Stratford are specifically recruiting officers of color with higher salaries in order to diversify their towns’ forces. (The union’s attorney said the union’s list did not include retirees, but rather cops who have resigned to join other departments.)
As for the reference to the raises offered in Waterbury and Bridgeport, Harp said, she was pointing out similar specific “raises people got … Not all the ways they were implemented was the same.”
The city never put in a last best offer to union because the union has failed to respond to a proposal the city put on the table in the first place, Harp said. She accused the union of falsely claiming the city wanted to put “entire caps off health benefits and not offering anything except a lot higher cost for health care,” when the arbitration process hasn’t even resolved the health care issue yet. “When you do binding arbitration, you have to indicated what you would arbitrate on. They didn’t put health care on that. We had to bring it to their attention so it could be discussed in binding arbitration.”
Paul Bass contributed reporting.
Click the Facebook live video below to catch the entire union press conference: