Contract negotiations are again underway for Tallahassee firefighters. But unlike last time, the city and the union seem more positive about reaching a deal. The newfound push for an agreement follows a contentious local primary.
In an email following a negotiating session earlier this week, City Manager Reese Goad wrote to Mayor John Dailey and the other commissioners that that first meeting was productive. He added that Fire Chief Gene Sanders is also confident of a positive outcome and that negotiations could be finalized as early as Monday, September 9th – the next negotiating session.
It’s a dramatic switch from the city’s posture of the past year, where the two sides ultimately ended up before a state arbiter, with a deal that left the firefighters deeply unhappy.
The shift in tone also follows last month’s local primary elections, in which two commissioners were on the ballot. City Commissioner Jack Porter was re-elected outright, and Mayor Pro Tem Curtis Richardson made the run-off, coming in second to former mayor Dot Inman-Johnson. Porter says the matter of the firefighters’ contract helped her to win.
“I spoke to several voters who were single-issue voters,” she said, “who told me that although they might disagree with me on many issues, my support for the firefighters’ union was the reason they were supporting me.”
The morning after the election, Porter and Richardson attended a quasi-judicial hearing on a one-year contract for the local firefighters’ union. That contract had been delayed by more than 20 negotiating sessions, a declaration of impasse by the union, and the intervention by the magistrate.
“I want our firefighters, our captains and battalion chiefs to know that I fully support you and what you do,” Richardson said at the quasi-judicial hearing.
The firefighters’ union had endorsed him throughout his years on the commission and before that, when he served in the Legislature. But this year, they endorsed his opponent, Dot Inman-Johnson, because Richardson had voted with the commission majority – Mayor Dailey and Commissioner Dianne Williams-Cox – against giving them a raise.
“This community values the invaluable service that you provide on a daily basis to this community,” Richardson. “So, I don’t want anybody to think that the decisions that I make indicate that I do not support – or any of us do not support the professional services that you provide every day.”
Some say the lack of a raise for the firefighters moved many voters. During the primary cycle, yard signs saying “I stand with the firefighters” popped up in yards, alongside roads and in front of local businesses.
Mathew Isbell does data analysis and consulting for campaigns, and he supported Porter and Inman-Johnson. He thinks others did, "because I think it feeds into the broader story, like, okay, ‘The commission is divided’ and it seems to be divided into very specific camps where the firefighters are being punished because they were on the opposite side in the last election," he said.
“They got batted around for months and months, and now you give them a contract, but you won’t make it retroactive.”
The fight over a contract for the firefighters has grown deeply political in recent years—a situation that other local unions, such as the police officers, haven’t faced. And when asked whether the firefighter issue is political, most of the candidates this cycle said, yes.
