Off the ballot

Houston firefighters deserved better, while timeline is needed for processing petitions.

Two months from today, Houstonians will already have begun casting early votes before an Election Day critical to our city’s future. Voters will pass judgment on almost $1.5 billion worth of bonds as well as nine new members for community college and school boards. But one noteworthy issue will be conspicuously missing from the ballot.

Alas, we won’t have a November referendum on whether Houston firefighters should collect essentially the same base pay as police officers. Firefighters gathered more than 32,000 signatures on petitions to put that question before voters in November, but their efforts were stymied. Now they have good reason to be upset, and our city’s elected leaders need to establish rules to make sure this doesn’t happen again.

The pay parity proposal grew out of a long-running contract dispute that came to an impasse earlier this year. Firefighters have worked without a contract for more than three years, repeatedly rejecting what the city has offered and arguing in court that the city is negotiating in bad faith.

So they revived an idea from 1975, when the influential firefighters’ union convinced City Council to pass a motion that essentially said police and firefighters of equivalent ranks ought to collect the same base pay. Pay parity slipped by the wayside two decades later, but firefighters circulated petitions earlier this summer calling for a voter referendum on reinstating it. If the referendum passes, pay parity between police and firefighters would be mandated by Houston’s city charter.

We’ve said before that we believe parity is bad public policy. Just because police and firefighters wear badges and uniforms and drive around in vehicles equipped with sirens doesn’t mean there’s a direct equivalence between their jobs. If there’s a crime wave, putting parity in the city charter could hamstring a future mayor struggling to spend more money on police.

Still, the process that kept this referendum off the ballot is flawed and it needs to change. Every petition for a referendum must be processed by the city secretary’s office, which conducts the time-consuming task of confirming how many people signing their names are actually registered Houston voters. In this case, City Secretary Anna Russell is following her longstanding practice of verifying voter petitions in the order in which they’re delivered to her office. She says her staff, in addition to its regular duties, has been dealing with another petition on pension reform delivered to City Hall earlier this year. Nothing in any city ordinance or state law sets a deadline for processing those petitions. As a result, neither of these issues will appear on the November ballot.

Our mayor and city council need to straighten this out. They need to set clearly defined timelines for processing petitions delivered to the city secretary’s office. If citizens like the firefighters want an issue to appear on the November ballot, they need to know a deadline for submitting petitions. That’s only fair, and it’s the only way to avoid accusations that the mayor and city secretary are playing fast and loose with election rules.

We probably haven’t seen the last of the firefighters’ parity pay plan. Assuming they gathered enough valid petition signatures to require a referendum, we’ll see it on the ballot next year. But unless our city sets clearly defined timelines for processing petitions, firefighters won’t be the last people to think they’ve been cheated out of their place on the ballot.

Unless our city sets clearly defined timelines for processing petitions, firefighters won’t be the last people to think they’ve been cheated out of their place on the ballot.