My solution to police pension stalemate

There is a win-win solution to Oakland's stalemate over police layoffs. There is an alternative to layoffs and to the impasse over pensions that is financially responsible. We must act to preserve the time, money and effort that has gone into recruiting and training our new officers, avoid layoffs, and get them back on the beat. As Chief Batts has recently pointed out, crime tends to peak in August and September, we need to act now to break this impasse.

The stalemate centers around the police officers' union (OPOA) request for a three year no layoff pledge in exchange for the Officers paying their "employee share" pension contribution of 9%. This pension contribution would be an important part of helping to build a long-term financially sustainable system.

I think we should accept and I have a proposal that allows us to do so. My proposal avoids the need for police layoffs, gets the 9% pension contribution from the OPOA and does not require our residents to pay a new $360 parcel tax.

We were asked to refrain from publicly discussing our proposals, until negotiations ended, but given the lack of a resolution and the urgency for Oakland to resolve this logjam I am putting it forward now.

My proposal is during the next three years (the duration of the OPOA's current contract) as long as the City honors its no lay off guarantee the police continue to pay the 9% toward their pension. We can avoid layoffs both by agreeing to a retirement program and by taking other steps to improve our financial situation. In order to protect all parties to the agreement, I would propose a provision that if layoffs took place during the contract, the pension contribution would be reduced to 4%.

A combination of normal attrition and the savings from the 9% would allow us to avoid police layoffs, while also giving us the opportunity and time to reach agreement on other cost-saving/non-layoff solutions for our police force. This would meet the police union’s demands of no layoffs and take a much-needed step toward necessary structural change.

Many of the recently laid off officers are some of our youngest and most diverse. They also cost less than older officers. Taxpayers have made a significant investment in their recruitment and training. This is an investment that cannot be wasted. We save much more money by allowing more senior officers to leave the force through a retirement program like the one requested by OPOA, rather than laying-off the most junior officers.

We must include other ways to reduce costs while assuring public safety. These include achieving full compliance with the Riders settlement so that we can move sworn officers from Internal Affairs to community policing, and civilianizing certain tasks, such as intake of civilian complaints and clerical tasks, to lower costs and increase efficiencies.

Other cities are using civilians to do routine clerical tasks previously done by police officers. The civilians cost about half what a police officer costs. This frees up more cops for patrol and community policing efforts. Here in Oakland we need to work together in a way that everybody contributes and shares in providing for the public safety and the fiscal sustainability of our city.

This statement was first published at ABetterOakland.com.

Update to answer questions, Friday July 30:

It is important that we deal with the immediate problem, which is getting the recently laid off cops back on the beat. This will give us an opportunity to work on other strategies to avoid the need for layoffs in the future. These include retirement incentives and hiring additional civilians to perform clerical duties so cops can be freed up to do more community policing.

Some are asking how getting 9% can make up for 80 layoffs so I'd like to take this opportunity to further explain how this works.

Here's the breakdown:

• A 9% pension contribution isn't enough to cover the money it would take to keep 80 officers.

• Because of the way Measure Y was originally written, the actual budget savings achieved by laying off 80 cops is only the equivalent of laying off 25 cops.

• And, the amount of money brought in by the 9% pension contribution (roughly $8 million) exceeds the actual costs saved by the 80 layoffs.

Others also have asked, what if we make a deal this year, but it gets worse next year and we have no choice but to reduce force?

I'd like to answer this question with a few statements:

• Let's work to make that not happen, but with normal attrition, in a year, the force would end up reduced without layoffs.

• Anytime there's a need for force reduction, it's better to give departure bonuses for higher salary people, instead of laying off the recently hired and trained and thus lower paid officers.

And to address the issue of council members not paying into our pensions.

• Rather than paying a 9 percent contribution we took a 10 percent salary cut. If the police union would like us to make more concessions in exchange for their concessions to save the force I would support that.