Aurora cops get 1% raises, insurance changes
Aurora's police patrol officers will get much smaller raises than they wanted the next two years under a contract partially set by an arbitrator.
While the city heralded the contract as a relief for taxpayers, the police union's president said the arbitrator's ruling left some unanswered questions.
The agreement gives employees in the Association of Professional Police Officers a 1 percent raise for the contract year beginning March 6, 2011 and a 2 percent raise for the contract year beginning March 6, 2012.
It also changes the way officers will pay their health insurance costs.
Each year, the city, which is self-insured, determines how much money it paid in claims for employees with each type of insurance plan, Chief Management Officer Carie Anne Ergo said.
Those totals, divided by the number of employees insured by each plan, are called the premium.
Beginning Jan. 1, 2012, the arbitrator's ruling requires police union members to pay either ten percent of the premium, or 12.75 percent of the premium, depending on which insurance plan they use, Ergo said.
But the arbitrator's ruling documents did not specify what the percentage of the premium would be.
That left Dave Schmidt, the union's president, wondering how insurance costs for his union's membership would be affected.
He said officers were fine with the current system of insurance payments, so the ruling is a fix for something that wasn't broken.
“Before, it was based on a percentage of pay; now it's based on a percentage of the premium,” Schmidt said.
“We don't know what the percentage of the premium is.”
Schmidt also questioned the details of an extra pay increase included in the first year of the contract for some officers.
According to the contract agreed upon by the parties, an extra $1,000 will be added to the 2011 salaries of all officers who have been with the department ten years or longer. But what about those officers who reach the 10-year milestone in 2011? Schmidt asked
Ergo said the extra $1,000 only will be given to officers who had worked for the department ten years or more when the agreement began.
In a request to the arbitrator, the union had asked for a 2 percent raise in January, a 3 percent raise in March and a 3 percent raise in March, 2012.
Schmidt said the small raises and insurance payment changes mandated by the arbitrator left his union, which lost eight members to layoffs effective Jan. 1, disappointed.
The arbitrator's ruling, released last week, came after negotiations between the city and the police union came to an impasse.
The union filed an unfair labor practices complaint against the city in January, but it was dismissed in May.