Legal battle over pay has lasted 25 years
By Bruce Eggler
Times-Picayune
Copyright 2007 The Times-Picayune Publishing Company
NEW ORLEANS — Ensuring that New Orleans’ long-running legal battle over firefighters’ pay will continue a while longer, the city has appealed Civil District Judge Kern Reese’s recent rulings on the issue to the state 4th Circuit Court of Appeal.
City Attorney Penya Moses-Fields said this week that the city is challenging two aspects of Reese’s decisions, which generally upheld the firefighters’ position on how their longevity raises should be calculated.
After a legal battle that went on for 25 years, the city in late January began paying firefighters state-mandated longevity raises that the city had refused for decades to implement.
The city now is challenging Reese’s ruling that the firefighters also are entitled to city longevity raises, although not to both types of raises in the same year.
City civil service rules give employees a 2.5 percent raise their first year and then every fifth year. The state law gives them a 2 percent raise each year from their third through 23rd years.
In implementing the state raises this year, the city stripped away credit for previous city longevity raises that it said should no longer apply. It said firefighters were not entitled to “double dip” by benefiting from two different sets of longevity raises.
As a result, many firefighters reported they received far smaller raises in January than they had expected, with some saying their new paychecks actually were smaller than in the past, even though the city at the same time had implemented a 10 percent across-the-board raise that the City Council approved for firefighters last fall despite Mayor Ray Nagin’s opposition.
Moses-Fields said the city has accepted the courts’ ruling “that firefighters are to receive longevity rate increases under the more favorable state-mandated system, a system which results in increasing firefighters’ pay four times faster than any other first responder or city employee. However, in these days of limited city resources, to allow firefighters to benefit from both systems simultaneously will unjustly affect all other city employees.”
The city had made the same arguments to Reese, but he rejected them. Saying he was “disturbed by the city’s unilateral retraction of the city’s longevity pay increase granted under the civil service pay plan,” Reese said he “did not deem it equitable to unilaterally strip away a legally conferred benefit.” He said that resulted in “unwarranted pay cuts to long-term employees.”
The issues the city is raising on appeal relate to credits it says were awarded to it in earlier court judgments.
A 1999 ruling by Civil District Judge Robert Katz awarded the city a credit in the calculation of firefighters’ “back pay and future pay” for “any payments” made under the city’s civil service longevity rules, Moses-Fields said. Reese’s ruling would deny the city that credit, she said.
The city also is challenging Reese’s refusal to award it credits to which it claims it is entitled for discretionary pay raises granted to firefighters during the 1970s. A 2003 ruling of the Court of Appeal said the city would receive credit for such raises.
The city is seeking expedited consideration of its appeal by the appellate court, Moses-Fields said.