Crime & Safety

Police Union Heads To Mediation Over 2012 contract

For four months, the union representing 26 police officers has tried to negotiate with officials from the Village of Caledonia. Now they are at an impasse.

Patrol officers with the and village officials will meet with a state mediator on Thursday to help them resolve issues with their 2012 contract.

The two sides have been negotiating since November. If they are unable to agree and mediation fails, officials with the 26-member Caledonia Professional Policemen’s Association Local 403 of the Wisconsin Professional Association (WPF) will go to arbitration.

The village is also still in closed-session negotiations with 35 union-represented employees of the .

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Officials with the Wisconsin Professional Police Association have not returned calls to Patch and local union members with the police union are not talking publicly about what the sticking points are in those negotiations.

Yet, Village Board members approved a budget in October that called for all into the Wisconsin Retirement System and pay 15 percent of their insurance premiums. Despite the passage of the budget, the police and fire unions still need to approve their contract with the Village because Act 10 of the Budget Repair Bill exempted from these unilateral decisions being made for them at the municipal level. The budget repair bill also prohibits insurance revisions.

Find out what's happening in Caledoniawith free, real-time updates from Patch.

Tom Weatherston, a Village Board member, said the budget was passed with the expectation that the unions would agree to the provisions, but Village officials didn’t start negotiating with the police and fire unions until after the budget was passed.

“If the police/fire (unions) decided to contribute to pension and medical like everyone else is, then there would be a surplus of funds. My position is that the surplus should be used to give everyone a pay raise, but most of the board was not amenable to that,” Weatherston said.

Tom Lebak, the Village Administrator, said fire and police personnel represented by the unions are still operating under the provisions of the old contract and they currently don’t pay anything into their retirement system while non-represented employees have been paying 5.9 percent of their wages towards their pension since June 30, 2011 and any other employees that had previously been in a represented union other than the patrol and firefighters' union – including the highway department and sergeants' union – started paying into their pension since Jan. 1, 2012 when their contract ran out.

Currently, fire and police union employees pay 10 percent of the insurance premium while non-represented employees are paying 15 percent of their premiums. However, the insurance plan for union members has a deductible that is $500 more than the deductible in the policy for unrepresented employees, Lebak said, and union members' pharmacy co-pay is higher and their office co-pay is $25 more.

The sergeants also had a union, but they opted to disband late last year after there weren’t enough voting members to be able to reconstitute themselves.

“The provisions in Act 10 made it less advantageous for us to continue and we found out that we weren’t allowed to negotiate,” said Sgt. Brian Wall. “So when we found that out, that’s when our union representative came to us and said you’ve lost your ability to negotiate and we really can’t provide you anymore services, so why pay union dues?”

All five members of the Sergeants’ union voted to disband the union.

“I’m fine with it,” Wall said. “I’m not worried about it. I realize now that I’m an at-will employee now.”

Still, Wall said he wasn’t aware of the provisions in Act 10 until they sat down with Village officials to negotiate their contract.

“And apparently our labor representative had only recently become aware of it at that time,” he said.

Officials with the police union and the Village Board are expected to meet with a state mediator at 2 p.m. on Thursday. Lebak said the mediator will meet with each group separately to see what they are asking for, and then share that information with the two sides. 

“They use their mediating skills to try to get parties to agree," Lebak said, "and if that doesn’t work, it goes to arbitration.”


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