Union wants pay raise on ballot
Firefighters push petition to ask voters to decide
Houston firefighters are launching a campaign to place on item on the November ballot asking voters to mandate parity in pay between corresponding firefighter and police-officer ranks.
The petition drive to amend the city charter, slated to launch Saturday morning, follows the fire union’s decision last month to sue the city over stalled contract talks, alleging Mayor Sylvester Turner’s administration failed to negotiate in good faith.
“I don’t know what else to do. We’re trying to find a fair and reasonable solution that affects 4,100 members and their families,” said Marty Lancton, president of the Houston Professional Fire Fighters Association. “Let’s let the voters decide what’s fair and we’ll see.”
The mayor’s office declined comment.
Houston firefighters have been without a contract for three years. The “evergreen” terms that had governed their employment during that time lapsed last month, reverting to state law and local ordinance. City Council made the terms in that local ordinance less favorable in a unanimous vote on the same morning the union filed its lawsuit.
Turner’s landmark pen-
sion reforms have further roiled the firefighters, who bitterly opposed the changes the Legislature adopted this past spring. With the reforms’ July 1 effective date, firefighters joined all other city employees in effectively taking a pay cut, as they are required to put more of their paychecks toward their now-reduced retirement benefits.
The firefighters’ pension board — a separate entity from the union — sued the city in hopes of blocking the reforms, but that challenge was dismissed last week.
City treatment ‘disturbing’
A document provided by Lancton shows police have negotiated roughly 30 percent worth of pay raises between 2008 and 2019, while firefighters would have received raises of about 13 percent in that period.
“It’s bordering on very disturbing the way the city treats firefighters,” Lancton said, adding that his group’s effort seeks only to return to Houston’s historical parity between police and fire personnel.
A 1975 City Council motion did set the goal of achieving parity in the base pay of equivalent ranks in the public safety departments, and the topic spurred regular fights throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Typically, firefighters and their supporters on council were in the position of working to ensure their salaries kept pace with police pay, though they were not always successful.
Parity was regularly mentioned into the mid-2000s, but the late 1998 contract negotiated by the newly recognized police union began to dismantle that system, recalled Mark Clark, executive director of the Houston Police Officers Union.
That police contract, Clark said, began adjusting HPD’s personnel structure so that the city could grant raises to, for example, 38 police captains without having to also boost the salaries of more than 120 fire personnel of corresponding rank.
“I know they’re desperate and they’re my friends, but this is a non-starter,” Clark said of the firefighters’ petition drive. “They’ve got an important job, but police and firefighters do not have the same job, and their rank structures are completely different. Just to come in and say, ‘We want what they’ve got’ — certainly I understand asking, but where in the world would the city of Houston come up with the kind of money that it would take?”
Neither fire union leaders nor the city finance department had estimates for the cost of the union’s parity proposal, but data collected by fire union leaders show the base pay earned by various ranks in the department is 13 percent to 23 percent below that earned by police personnel of equivalent rank.
Using average figures for the cost of police and fire personnel without regard to rank, increasing fire base pay to match that of police would cost roughly $40 million in the current fiscal year. The city finance department projects annual budget deficits of more than $100 million for the next five years.
“There’s no doubt that the fiscal note on a pay parity deal would be massive,” said Texas Southern University political scientist Jay Aiyer.
‘Job is different’
Aiyer served as chief of staff to former Mayor Lee Brown, who was in his first term when the 1998 police contract was enacted and whose relationship with the firefighters soured during his six years in office, in part over contract issues.
“The public recognizes the contribution first responders make, so I think if left to their own devices, the concept of, ‘They put their life on the line, they should be paid at the same level as police,’ I think is something that politically they could be successful in,” Aiyer said. “It’s problematic because the fundamental job is different than police. There’s differences in pay structure, there’s differences in the way they’re promoted.”