Starting Salaries Soar
The deal has been made.
The Los Angeles City Council just authorized a four-year labor contract that will provide raises for 9,900 LAPD officers.
The new contract between the city and the Los Angeles Police Protective League will not provide any immediate raises. But it does call for a 4% cost-of- living adjustment in July 2016, followed by a 2% percent increase in July 2017 and another 2% percent in January 2018.
In a time when agencies are struggling to find recruits for a variety of reasons, including starting pay, the contract provides a higher starting annual salary, to $57,420 up from $49,924. That’s a pretty hefty jump.
The contract also covers $80 million toward overtime costs in fiscal year 2015-16. There’s $90 million for OT in 2016-17 and $100 million in 2017-18.
League members will be pleased to hear about the OT allotments, specifically because the city had previously been banking overtime payments and saying they’d pay officers later.
The contract also includes a 5% increase in health-care subsidies, a $500 increase in the annual uniform allowance, and an optional overtime buy-down and increase in cash overtime.
The contract’s term began July 1, 2014, and runs through June 30, 2018.
The LA police union rejected a different contract proposal last summer that would have boosted starting annual salaries, but included no salary increases for officers already on the job.
“I don’t think either side wanted this to drag on any longer,” league President Craig Lally said. “Crime is up. Morale is down. We needed to move forward.”
Lally described the new proposed contract as one in which both sides had given ground. “I would have preferred a raise immediately,” he said. “We’re not getting anything for two years. I think we’re actually helping the mayor quite a bit. We get that we have to do our part and our part is taking zero for the first two years.”
Union officials say that the city’s pay scale created problems in recruiting and retaining officers, who have been lured away by more lucrative jobs at other Southern California law enforcement agencies.
According to a story in the LA Times, city officials have also had to contend with rank-and-file officers’ resentment over a generous contract signed with the coalition’s civilian employees in 2007. That deal gave a 24.5% raise over several years to 20,000 clerks, janitors, tree trimmers and other workers. Police officers’ total pay raise during the same period was about 14%.
City Administrative Officer Miguel Santana, the city’s lead negotiator in labor talks, said the coalition’s pay increase created a “distortion in the way raises have been given.”
Garcetti has preached austerity and persuaded other labor groups, including the powerful union that represents Department of Water and Power workers, to accept contracts that included no or far smaller pay increases. Last month, Garcetti expressed reluctance to grant raises to city employees.
“There’s nothing I’d like to do more than give workers a raise and even expand benefits,” he said in an interview with The Times. “But we can only spend what we have.”
Santana has also warned that the city needs to hold the line on city employees’ wages and pension costs to eliminate recurring budget deficits. He said that the proposed police raises have been structured to minimize strain on city coffers.