Urgent Membership Alert and Call to Action issued

Sep 2009

On Friday, the League issued an important alert to its membership due to fast-moving developments relating to the MOU negotiations and the city budget crisis.

Triggering the Membership Alert was action by the City Executive Employee Relations Committee (EERC) again rejecting proposed options as negotiated between LAPPL and City negotiators to achieve agreement on a new Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) for the rank and file officers of the LAPD. (For those of you new to the city negotiating process, the EERC consists of Mayor Villaraigosa, City Council President Eric Garcetti, Mayor Pro Tempore Jan Perry, Budget and Finance Committee Chair Bernard Parks and the Personnel Committee Chair Dennis Zine.)

This negotiated proposal would have provided cost savings to the City while protecting police officers’ salary and benefits from take-aways. Regrettably, this was the fourth time in recent months that the EERC and/or the Mayor rejected our cost savings proposals.

To date, the League has offered the City several options to achieve needed savings. Despite the best efforts of the League’s negotiating team, the EERC sent us back to the negotiating table with still more demands. The moving targets and the intentional impediments of the negotiation process in establishing a new MOU for our members are leading to what could end up being unilateral implementation by the City of successor terms and conditions to our expired MOU.

If it comes to implementing the City’s last, best and final offer, (which they themselves have described as “Draconian”) a process would be triggered that would take a number of months to run its course. Until such time as that occurred, all terms and conditions of the previous MOU remain in full force and effect.

The LAPPL Board of Directors believes it has fully addressed the fiscal concerns of the City. The League negotiating team has gone above and beyond to provide the “shared sacrifice” the Mayor has called for.

The battle lines are being drawn and a battle looms.

The Board has formed a Call to Action Committee – a group of delegates from throughout the City to work with the Board of Directors to implement our response should the City declare an impasse and proceed with unilateral implementation of pay and working conditions.

We have contacted all City Councilmembers and other elected officials giving them the status of our negotiations to date and making it very clear that the City taking the action of unilateral implementation would cause irreparable damage to our working relationship. We want these elected officials to get personally involved to help resolve a deteriorating situation.

The League maintains a list of some 400,000 email addresses of registered voters in the City of Los Angeles, arranged by Council District. We will be harnessing that list once again to alert voters that public safety is under attack by city leaders. And, once again, we will ask for their intervention and assistance.

To summarize:

We have offered cost savings that preserve public safety and avoid officer furloughs.

The insistence on continuing to hiring new officers is setting the City up for a public safety crisis and potentially subjecting our members to unnecessary and irresponsible furloughs.

It makes no sense to continue hiring when the City still needs to cut millions of dollars from its budget. The Octomom Principle: You can't keep adding to the family if you can't support the kids you've already got.

It also makes no sense to furlough experienced, highly trained police officers while hiring rookies that need years on the job to match the knowledge and experience of the officers the City proposes to furlough.

Public safety must be the City’s No. 1 priority. That is a vital prerequisite for the City’s eventual economic recovery.

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