January 30, 2012 · Derek

Tacoma's Fire Union Accepts Concessions to Save Jobs

It looks like Tacoma’s firefighters will be joining our police in accepting pay concessions in order to save the jobs of their coworkers. We don’t know the full details yet, but as The News Tribune reported Friday, the concessions will include another year without COLA pay raises (the fire union forewent their cost-of-living increase last year too). The fire union package is likely to be similar to that agreed to by the police, and accepted by the City Council last week with Resolution No. 38418.

This is, of course, not the end of the story. So far the City has shrunk the gap in the general fund, now estimated at $33 million, by a little more than half. Round one has included a few revenue-generating measures (business license increases, false alarm fees, traffic camera fines, etc), but the majority of the savings have come from cuts – and most of those have been to jobs. The City has already made it known that more job cuts are likely to be a part of round two, but the make-up of those changes remains hazy. We’re wondering how many more cuts to expenditures the City can afford to take before services are seriously impacted. Is it perhaps time to turn more attention to revenue generation?

We’re hoping to begin to hear a little about what round two will look like sometime very soon. Or maybe Interim City Manager Ray Arellano will delay that portion until he passes the baton to Tacoma’s new City Manager, and allow T.C. Broadnax to announce the cuts when he takes the reigns in early February. We’ll just have to wait and see.