After 50 minutes in closed-door session during a special meeting on March 2, the Belleville City Council voted unanimously to approve a two-year union contract with the Belleville local of the Michigan Association of Fire Fighters.
It is effective Feb. 2 and was already approved by the union local, which is made up of 15 paid-on-call fire fighters.
The contract will be ready for public review subject to final approval by the city’s labor attorney John C. Clark of Giarmarco, Mullins & Horton of Troy.
When the Independent asked what the attorney was going to do with the contract, Mayor Kerreen Conley said he would be putting it into final format.
“I’ll clean it up and put it in shape,” Clark said. “Then it can be released.”
This is the first contract for Belleville’s fire department, which organized under MAFF two years ago. Negotiations have been dragging along since they organized and even went into mediation.
Sumpter Township fire fighters organized under MAFF and it took just two months to get their first contract.
Nine fire fighters filed into the meeting room as the council’s closed-door session opened into public session for its vote on the contract. Mayor Conley asked each fire fighter to identify him/herself and they did.
Belleville union president Brian Blackburn said previously that the fire fighters voted to join MAFF because they felt the city was not treating them fairly.
After two years of negotiations, in January, MAFF executive director Fred Timpner said it looked like there would have been an agreement in December, but the employer backed away from the items agreed upon.
He said the union finally filed for binding arbitration because “we’re at an impasse.” The state was expected to assign an arbitrator by the end of January.
Timpner said the last agreement was taken to the mayor in December and it came back changed and there was no further movement.
The cost of binding arbitration was to have been split between the city and MAFF and would be a total from $10,000 to $20,000, split equally, not including the transcript and attorney fees, Timpner said.
The negotiating team for the city was City Manager Diana Kollmeyer and attorney Clark. Negotiating for the fire fighters was union president Brian Blackburn and Timpner of MAFF.
“Hopefully with this two-year contentious ordeal behind us we can get back to our full attention to safety of the citizens of the city of Belleville and surrounding communities,” Blackburn said. “We look forward to our BLS upgrade program to improve our service to the citizens and be an improving asset to the community.
He explained, “Most of our members are EMTs or Paramedics, yet our department license is only at the Medical First Responder level. We are looking to upgrade our license to Basic Life Support (BLS) so that we can use skills our members already have and provide more pre-hospital care to our patients. This includes diabetic care, use of epi-pens and other pre-hospital care that we currently can’t do. We have the enthusiastic support of Wayne County to do to this.”
At Monday’s regular meeting of the Belleville City Council, in reply to a question from the audience on what the contract covered, Mayor Conley said it covered rates of pay, clothing, and life insurance.
She said the contract is not exclusive, which means if the city decides to cover the work done by the fire department in another way, it can.
UPDATE