By Bruce Eggler
Times-Picayune (New Orleans)
Copyright 2006 The Times-Picayune Publishing Company
New Orleans firefighters Wednesday won another in a string of legal victories in their effort to get the city to pay them long-overdue, state-mandated longevity raises.
Civil District Judge Kern Reese ordered the city to immediately start paying the firefighters “the legally mandated rates of pay” or be found in “direct contempt of the orders of this court.”
In his five-page judgment, Reese three times capitalized and underlined the word “immediately” in saying how soon he wants the city to carry out his order. Otherwise, he said, “swift and appropriate sanctions will be rendered.”
Mayor Ray Nagin’s administration has offered to pay firefighters $2.1 million in 2007 in longevity increases, and officials of Fire Fighters Association Local 632 said that amount would cover the raises ordered by Reese, although the city has disagreed with the union about the formula to be used to calculate raises for individual firefighters.
Under the city formula, union leaders said, some firefighters would get as much as a 25 percent raise and others would get nothing or would owe the city money.
Reese sided with the firefighters on the issue of which formula to use.
In offering $2.1 million in overdue longevity raises, however, the administration has refused to give firefighters an additional 10 percent across-the-board raise, which the city says would cost another $2.1 million a year. All other city workers, including police, got a 10 percent raise this fall.
Nagin repeated that position last week in presenting his 2007 budget proposal to the City Council, but both the council and the Civil Service Commission have voted to give firefighters both sets of raises.
Reese’s decision Wednesday does not affect the issue of whether to give the 10 percent raise.
It also does not directly affect the city’s largest obligation to firefighters: an estimated $100 million or more in lump-sum payments, ranging from a few thousand dollars to several hundred thousand dollars, that are due to about 1,000 current and retired firefighters or their heirs to cover lost raises going back to 1990. How the city will deal with that debt remains unknown.
Nick Felton, president of the firefighters union, said he was “elated” with Reese’s ruling. “This is what we’ve been fighting for,” he said. “This is the ruling we’ve been looking for.”
Although the administration has estimated the cost of implementing the longevity increases at $2.1 million a year, Felton said he thought the cost would be $1.6 million or $1.7 million because of a sharp decline in the number of firefighters since Hurricane Katrina.
Felton urged the city not to try to appeal the case further. Lawsuits involving firefighters’ pay have been working their way through the court system for many years, and the city has consistently lost.
City Attorney Penya Moses-Fields said she was studying Reese’s ruling and would not comment on it until she had a chance to discuss it with Nagin and the City Council in executive session.
The dispute about firefighters’ pay stems from the city’s failure for many years to implement an automatic 2 percent annual raise for most firefighters that the Legislature mandated in the late 1960s but did not provide money to local governments to cover. No other local workers got the automatic raises.
The Supreme Court upheld the legality of the mandated raises in 2001, leaving the administrations of Mayor Marc Morial and then Nagin to try to deal with years of unpaid raises.
In his ruling, Reese said the pay dispute “has languished for over 25 years. The time has now arrived for the city of New Orleans and the Civil Service Commission to compensate its firefighters as mandated by law. This court fully expects this order to be implemented IMMEDIATELY.”