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Friday, April 26, 1991 / University Daily Kansan
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City, firefighters near pact
Wages, key items remain unresolved
By Vanessa Fuhrmans Kansan staff writer
Despite some unresolved items in firefighter contract negotiations, city and firefighter union officials say they are still discussing about reaching an agreement soon.
After a week of negotiations, teams from the city and union met again Wednesday, this time to discuss the city work-agreement proposal. The city agreed in response to the firefighters' plan, which union officials presented last week.
Rod Bremby, assistant city manager and chief negotiator for the city, said the two parties already had reached an agreement on the work agreement. However, the
"We'll get to the point very quickly where we'll know whether it's going to be closure or impasse," he said. "The biggest items are yet to come."
most critical items, including wages reclassification, still have not been determined.
Bremby said the city had to revise parts of its proposal because some of its previous research, such as comparisons to firefighter contracts in other Big Eight cities, proved to be irrelevant to the negotiations.
"We were making some bad comparisons," he said. "Our argument was that we shouldn't."
Bob Kent, firefighters union representative, said that although the data collected from peer cities could be useful, the research did not take the local labor market of those cities into account.
'We don't regard firefighters as
having a regional market," he said. "We're not in competition with other cities, so the relevant area is the local market area. That was our argument."
Despite the unresolved portions of the work agreement, Bremby said he thought the negotiations would reach closure as soon as next week.
"We made better progress than I thought," he said. "We could have made more if we had had all of the research."
Kent said that although talks had gone smoothly so far, he did not think that union and city officials would reach an agreement by next week.
"He's a little optimistic, I think," he said. "We still have to look at the city's proposal. I could be surprised; I hope I'm surprised."
The negotiating teams will meet again Wednesday.