This evening's workshop.

I call the workshop for August 26th, 2025 to order.

Our first item up is labor negotiations and 2026 collective bargaining agreements update.

Thank you, Mayor Partem and City Council.

Good evening.

I'm here this evening with Sarah Crossle Human Resources Director, as well as Brent Case.

He is a legal counsel for labor negotiations, and we're gonna give you an update on our labor negotiations for 2026 and beyond.

Just to start off, as you're aware, we have collective bargaining with our Lafayette Firefighters who are represented by the IAF, the Association of Firefighters, Local 4620.

And this collective bargaining was initiated in 2016.

In uh 2025, collective bargaining was initiated by the police officers, and they're represented by the FOP or the fraternal order of police, and that's Lodge 3.

We have three-year agreements with both of these parties, and we um aligned them intentionally to have their contracts um negotiated at the same time.

So 2025 is a contact contract negotiation year for both parties.

Um 2026 would be the initial contract year start year for both parties.

Um so we're getting those in place to start next year.

In terms of the status of the bargaining agreements, I'm gonna start with police.

So 2025 negotiations was the first year for police.

The ordinance passed to allow collective bargaining in March of 2025.

They then had to elect their bargaining agents, so their representative, and that happened in um March, and they elected the fraternal order of police to be their bargaining agent.

We that got us a little bit behind in initiating our negotiations, but we started our negotiations in May, and we kicked it off with a review of kind of our current budget conditions here in 2025 so they could sort of see what um the budget status looked like, what our financials look like, and what our 2026 projections were looking like.

And then we had ongoing negotiations for about three months, May through August.

Um we are in the process of final ratification with the um FOP Lodge, and that's currently underway.

So we're we're still meeting with them.

We have some really kind of finer points we're working through with them, but we by and large are in agreement.

We have a tentative agreement on almost everything, and um, we expect in the next week or two to have the final ratification, and then that'll be signed by um FOP and it'll be signed by the city manager only.

So a couple of highlights around this.

So this was a new agreement framework.

So we really spent the bulk of our time just kind of getting that new framework in place and working to align the framework with section 87 of the city code.

So as you might recall, we structured um what's in our city code to reflect largely what's in um the kind of bargaining framework for what we have for fire as well.

And so we focused on what is um what our city HR policies um reflect and compensation philosophies that we've adopted for the city through our class and compensation study.

Um we do, of course, recognize the unique aspects of public safety and policing, and um, so we capture that in the CB kind of in the CBA framework, and um really focus on the benefits, including health, dental, parental leave, military leave, disability benefits, and most other leave benefits.

Um and these really remain the same and are commonly applied for all employees.

So um, we were able to really effectively work with police to um remain, you know, to have in the CBA most of these benefits remain largely the same.

So um we had a lot of good conversations about that, and they're really satisfied with the way that our benefits are and how they're applied across the whole organization, including to um the police officers.

So some of the areas that we did negotiate with them and kind of discuss were of course around wages.

And so 2026 wages that we talked about, we are going to increase the wages that are subject to bargaining 4% over 2025 over 2025 wages in the agreements.

And the CBA will remain in place for the three year period, so through 2028.

However, we did agree to reopen the negotiation around wages for 2027 and 2028.

So we will come back and talk about wages for the 2027-2028 year for those out years next year in April.

Everything else will remain in place for those out years.

Really, for holiday accrual and cashing out use of their holiday.

So we're looking at it kind of a different way of them using their holiday because of the nature of their 24 hour operations and the nature of kind of how they schedule around holidays and how they use holidays and their kind of desire and need to use those holiday hours at different times versus kind of how our typical city employees are.

And then we also talked about specialty pay for some of the different officers and officer roles that they have.

Field training officers, including those who are actively training, doing field training, and then those who are supervisors of field training officers.

Kind of recognition the unique way that in public safety retirement typically happens a little bit on the earlier side.

And so for those officers who serve in public safety for years, this is a new retiree health insurance program that we'll be putting in place for those who are working for the city of Lafayette.

So those are kind of some of the main highlights of the police, and we'll be happy to answer questions at the end.

In FIRE, for 2025 negotiations, we began negotiations a little bit earlier.

We were able to start earlier since we already had a CBA in place and we were kind of working from the existing framework and just looking to make changes from what we had in place.

Represents the fourth CBA agreement with IAF.

And the parties met 10 times over four months.

But really, what it came down to is that we couldn't come to an agreement on a total total package.

And we have reached impasse.

And the primary area where we have been unable to come to agreements is around wages, around salary.

And so we really have a sizable gap in the wages where the firefighters are and where the city is.

And so we now are going to be moving along the process that we have in our code at the point of impasse.

And we'll talk about kind of the next steps here in a minute.

Okay, so next steps for for police for the FOP CBA.

The associated financial impacts will be incorporated into the 2026 budget.

And for IAF, we will be going to mediation with them.

We have that scheduled.