Olympia City Council approves interim police guild contract, but hints at future changes
Olympia City Council on Tuesday night unanimously approved an updated contract with the Olympia Police Guild, the union that represents 60 of the Olympia Police Department’s officers.
The previous contract expired at the end of 2019, and the guild has been operating under that terms of the expired contract since then.
The new contract covers two years, including 2020 (retroactively) and 2021; most of the changes have to do with wages and benefits.
The total cost to the city is $189,818 for 2020 and $119,541 for 2021.
Most of that cost is due to a 2% cost-of-living increase applied retroactively to 2020 and a cost-of-living increase for 2021 that will be tied to the consumer price index.
A smaller portion of the cost goes toward increasing life insurance benefits and specialty pay for certain employees: walking patrol and neighborhood policing units will receive a 3.3% raise, and detectives will receive a 0.7% raise.
Negotiations for the next contract will begin in the fall of 2021, according to Human Resources Director Linnaea Jablonski.
Council members Dani Madrone and Renata Rollins both said they intend to push for more substantive changes to the police guild contract at that time, after hearing feedback from residents through the new Social Justice and Equity Commission and the Ad-hoc Committee on Public Safety.
“We got a lot of input from the community about changes people wanted to see that would impact a contract but it’s also important for people to know that once the contract had been already under negotiation, it’s not legal in bargaining to bring up new issues at this point, and that’s why this contract is so limited to have to do with essentially cost-of-living increases,” Rollins said.
Rollins contrasted her support for this contract with her previous opposition to new police spending: She voted against a budget amendment last December that included $207,000 for police training and $225,000 to hire members of the Crisis Response Unit as full city employees (they are currently contractors) on the grounds that it should have been accompanied by cuts elsewhere in OPD’s budget.
“But I am an advocate for strongly taking a look at where we can make some changes in the following (police guild) contract,” she added.
Madrone hinted that reforming certain clauses of the contract when it’s re-negotiated this fall might be essential for achieving the goals that the two reform commissions are tasked with, but didn’t specifically say what those clauses might be.
“It’s possible that there are things in this contract that if we don’t address them, it will make it impossible to do some of the things that we want to do,” Madrone said.
This story is developing. Check back for further details.
This story was originally published January 13, 2021 at 5:45 AM.
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