City of Austin and EMS union didn't reach deal on contract
Tony Marquardt is President of the Austin-Travis County EMS Employee Association. He says they represent about 550 EMS personnel like paramedics and dispatchers.
On Monday, contract negotiations with the City of Austin came to an impasse.
"I'm really concerned that the message it sends to our workforce is that you are below police and fire and in order to navigate through that we don't have the time, patience or willingness," Marquardt said.
The City of Austin gave FOX 7 an e-mail to the Mayor and council from Assistant City Manager Mark Washington saying "At 5:40 pm today, the city declined to agree to any further extensions of the agreement. Although the city offered a pay package that would increase base pay by 10.5% over 5 years, the union wanted an additional $7m in compensation."
"They wanted all of these specialty pays and when we accommodated them on those issues they then wanted across the board pay raises...higher than we were willing to give all year," said Interim Labor Relations Officer Larry Watts.
Marquardt says one key issue was this: "We're in a negotiation session with an Interim City Manager and the lead negotiator is the Interim Director of Labor Relations."
The city offered to keep negotiating until midnight but Marquardt says that's something they couldn't swing due to members of his team working overnight on an ambulance.
"We lost a number of our team going on to 6 o'clock in the evening. They wanted to keep us there until midnight and we simply couldn't work within those parameters," Marquardt said.
Ed Scruggs, a Commissioner on the Public Safety Commission says it's disappointing. He was hoping they could reach a deal.
"Yeah I think that's really unfortunate, I prefer and I think the rest of the commission prefers that our public safety agencies are all under contract. Obviously that's a better working relationship, better management relationship with the city," Scruggs said.
The Austin City Council will receive a briefing from Watts on Thursday. Marquardt is hoping council will push for another shot at negotiations.
"I certainly hope they'll do that, I would much rather them get right back at talking then for them to go an extended period where they're not seeing anything," Scruggs said.
"My personal opinion is it would serve no purpose to go back to the negotiating table right now because we're $8 million apart and had a federal mediator in this month to try to resolve that problem and weren't able to resolve it," Watts said.
The City says without a contract, EMS will hire and promote strictly under the state's civil service law.
As for the union, Marquardt says it still exists but he won't be doing the job full time anymore -- he's going to have to go back to working an ambulance and representing employees in his spare time.