Bethesda Beat’s article “Report says it’s ‘impossible’ for public to decipher county’s contract with police union” completely misinterprets how badly the Office of Legislative Oversight report misunderstood the Collective Bargaining Agreement with our union.
Why is the Bethesda Beat giving Hans Reimer a platform to spout his anti-worker rhetoric yet again, yet you didn’t even contact us about this article?
We should be asking: Why is Hans Reimer using the Office of Legislative Oversight as a weapon to turn public opinion against the County workers? I wonder how many of the requests for OLO studies come from Reimer specifically to produce anti-worker reports?
“… It is impossible for a third-party reader to identify the terms and provisions of the collective bargaining agreement between the County and [Fraternal Order of Police] Lodge 35 because the parties do not agree on the primary document,” OLO senior legislative analysts Leslie Rubin and Aron Trombka wrote in the report.
First off, nowhere in County Collective Bargaining law does it say that the public needs to be able to decipher collective bargaining documents. They are legal documents and should be understood by the parties who are subject to them, in this case, the County Executive (the employer) and the FOP (employee representatives).
Second, a direct examination of the agreement’s copies would garner the issues: there are missing commas, periods, colons, footnotes, and semicolons between the FOP copy and the County copy. As you know, in legal documents, commas do matter, but the mismatch cannot be attributed to the collective bargaining process or to the FOP. Producing a finalized, signed document is not our responsibility.
It is also not County law that the documents be available on the website. If the County Council wants the documents available via the website, it can talk to the county executive’s office to have the document uploaded. The FOP makes the contract available to its members. Who is not doing their job?
The implication of the Bethesda Beat article is that somehow the union is gaming the County, or responsible for the county’s shortcomings. We are not. Our job is to follow the collective bargaining law and we’re doing our job
And then there is the taser issue…. Just another absurd claim by Councilmember Reimer. The FOP had asked the council to fund additional tasers for uniform officers and for a general wage adjustment. We were denied both. When equipment is needed, the council can make it a priority to provide funding. But now Councilmember Reimer is somehow confused about how funding works. He’s either lying about his misunderstanding or he is misinformed. Either way, who is not doing their job?
Councilmember Reimer and his cronies’ disdain for the County workforce is destroying public services. He has spent a lot of time trying to destroy labor relations and supersede county collective bargaining law. On nearly every possible opportunity, he has voted to reject pay increases for County employees. This Council is solely responsible for Montgomery County police officers being one of the lowest paid police agencies in the metropolitan area.
County workers are essential employees who are tasked with providing services to the most vulnerable in our community. Officers put their lives on the line, and he wants to demoralize them for missing commas and for his inability to figure out how to fund a request for nonlethal weapons. Who is not doing their job?
County collective bargaining law was voted in 40 years ago to create labor harmony between the County and its employees. Reimer would have us go back to when tumult ruled. You can’t move things forward that way.
Let’s all do our jobs according to the law. We’ll negotiate pay and working conditions with the County Executive’s office and the County Council will decide to fund or not fund those elements of the agreement that require funding. That’s County collective bargaining law and that’s Councilmember Reimer’s job. Get to work.