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City council ratifies "tentative" labor contracts December 4, 2019
"Lansing Reaches Agreement on Police Contract" says the mayor's 10/29/19 press release. Actually, there are two contracts, one for supervisory and one for non-supervisory police. But neither is a complete, signed contract. I say this because I sent a FOIA request asking for "the new labor contracts with the supervisory and non-supervisory bargaining units of the Capital City Labor Program - the police unions" and the 11/30/19 response says they don't exist:
A full month has passed since the mayor announced the contracts and they still don't exist. However, there are "tentative" contracts:
I didn't ask for tentative contracts, but here they are:
The difference between a contract and a tentative contract could be as simple as a couple of signatures at the bottom, but this is not the case here. One of the tentative contracts is 24 pages, the other is 23 pages. The previous contracts are 83 pages and 78 pages.
When the city council ratified them on October 28, it was noted in the resolutions that they were tentative:
Article 6, Chapter 2 of the City Charter says "Collective bargaining contracts shall become effective when ratified by the City Council in accord with State law." It says contracts, not tentative agreements. "Tentative" means not fully worked out or developed. It means not certain or fixed. The contracts were not complete when the city council ratified them on October 28 and they were still not finished as of November 30. The ratification ceremony was a charade. But why? What's the big hurry? Couldn't city leaders have waited until a full agreement was typed up and signed by both parties?
My guess is that there are no contracts because the city and the unions are still bargaining. There are going to be more changes than the ones we see in those tentative contracts.
An article titled Lansing's police contracts: Raises, fitness bonus but no retiree health care for new hires appeared in the Lansing State Journal on October 31. Reporter Sarah Lehr had only the tentative contracts to work with. Even then, the City demanded that she submit a FOIA request to get them. This stinks.
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