Nothing like having a City employee ratcheting up the billboard trash talking before implementing a new policy change. These guys really should pay attention to what not to do before a big football game. From The Hour:
Jim Haselkamp, city director of personnel and labor relations, said he recognizes the dispatchers have a stressful job but added they are well compensated for it — among the highest-paid in the state with base salaries ranging from $44,072 to $62,018 this fiscal year.
Haselkamp said the dispatchers’ beef with their contract is about money, not stress.
“I’m a little skeptical that it has anything to do with stress because they certainly don’t have problems working at time and a half,” he said. “From my perspective, we’ve been overpaying them.”
Veteran dispatchers Mike Devaney, Billy George, Eric Giddiens and Jim Wrinn, who have been at their jobs for about a decade each, said in a recent interview that they have been caught in a power struggle between police and fire departments that the powers-that-be would rather not acknowledge.
And it makes matters far worse, the dispatchers said, that they face a tougher schedule in the near future.
Starting Jan. 1, the city will reduce the extra day off the dispatchers now get bi-weekly — the same schedule police officers have, with a third day off every other week to compensate for required weekend and holiday work at regular pay — to every third week as agreed in their most recent contract.
The dispatchers said they got a raw deal in that contract because they belong to the Department of Public Works union, Local 2405, and were only 17 among more than 100 who work elsewhere.
Not only will the new schedule be logistically problematic, according to the dispatchers and police Lt. Mike King, who heads the combined dispatch center, but it will shrink the number of “stress days” that the dispatchers say they need badly.
The goal of combining police and fire dispatch, an effort started under former Mayor Alex Knopp, was to increase efficiency and public safety, said Mayor Richard A. Moccia. In 2006, civilian supervisors began taking over to put more police officers on the street — namely five as of Dec. 1, when the fifth civilian supervisor will start.
Prior to the combination of the police and fire dispatch centers in fiscal year 2003-04, the two centers were spending together a total of $1,357,184, according to a spreadsheet compiled by city Finance Director Tom Hamilton’s staff.
This year, combined dispatch has a budget of $2,139,653, including funding for 19 dispatchers, five supervisors and an emergency management deputy director. Hamilton noted that wage increases in contract settlements and added staff impacted the increase, which was presumably offset in part by a reduction in police overtime due to the freed officers.
Note that the combined dispatch services were run at about $800k less than now. I hope Noelle Frampton asked what the police and fire overtime for the same two periods was and is, because I betcha they didn’t go down.
What we have here is another failure of the Knopp administration to a) actually save the city any money b) actually understand what the policy impact would have on real people and c) failure to recognize that the management, as in the respective chiefs of the both departments are incapable of managing a combined workforce because they can’t even manage their own departments effectively. Mayor Moccia will have his hands full trying to get his chiefs to work this out and improve morale here.
And lastly, if Haselkamp was so worried about someone being overpaid he might want to look at Norwalk Museum curator Sue Gunn.
source: The Hour, Dispatchers struggle with more than stress Workers feel contract is unfair, criticism unwarranted, by Noelle Frampton, November 23, 2007
