Swampscott Fire Contract Settles Grievances, Provides Hazard Stipend

SWAMPSCOTT, MA — Swampscott Select Board members on Wednesday night expressed reluctance and frustration in a new firefighter contract that a majority of them voted to approve — settling outstanding union grievances, providing cost-of-living pay increases and ending a yearlong bargaining dispute with the department's union.

The new deal provides cost-of-living increases of at least 2.5 percent annually over each of the next three years, a $1,000 annual hazardous material stipend effective Jan. 1 that rises to $1,500 in 2024, and another $500 to reward firefighters who acted as public health agents patrolling beaches and handing out masks during the COVID-19 health crisis.

It also includes a one-time, $4,500 stipend — proposed to be paid using the town's American Rescue Plan Act funds — in recognition both of pandemic services to the residents of Swampscott, but also to settle several outstanding union grievances filed with the Massachusetts Labor Relations Commission against the town over hiring, staffing and other issues the union determined to be unfairly coercive.

"All told, I think we reached a pretty balanced deal," Fire Chief Graham Archer said. "I think we've reached something as balanced as we're going to get."

While four Select Board members — Chair Neil Duffy, Vice Chair David Grishman and Select Board members MaryEllen Fletcher and Katie Phelan — all expressed considerable reticence before casting a somber vote in favor of the deal, Select Board member Peter Spellios voted against it because of provision settling the grievances that he said he believed the town would have won.

"This is the most generous contract in the town in eight years," Spellios said. "I'm not sure the town can afford the contract or the precedent it sends."

Under the new deal, Chief Archer will be allowed to forgo minimal staffing requirements during the winter season if he can demonstrate the financial burden filling the shifts will place on the town. Archer said this provision further defines an authority he believed he had when he did not fill overtime shifts in the overburdened department at the height of COVID-related absences.

"It still doesn't say that that under no circumstances could a grievance be filed (over staffing levels)," he said. "I can't say for sure that they won't. I didn't think they had a strong case the last time."

Archer said union representation would have rejected language that expressed his unequivocal authority to alter staffing levels for any reason.

Town Administrator Sean Fitzgerald said it was determined during negotiations that settling the past staffing dispute and other lingering conflicts with the one-time ARPA payments would save the town legal fees in defending against them and "put to bed some of these annoying grievances and frustrations that get wrapped up in this agreement."

It was said that about $225,000 in ARPA funds will be expected to be used in the one-time stipends — leaving the town with about $4 million in ARPA funds remaining.

While Grishman said the contract made him "pretty uncomfortable," Fletcher said it was "disturbing to me" to use the ARPA funds in that way and Duffy said "this is the most uncomfortable I've been with any contract I've had to consider since being on the Board," Phelan said she hoped the new deal "will open a line of communication (with the union members) we did not have prior to the contract."

The contract calls for a 2.75 percent cost-of-living pay increase in 2023 and a 2.5 percent raise in 2024 and 2025. It also creates a position for a non-union administration assistant for the department, allows veteran status and being a spouse of a firefighter or police officer killed in the line of duty to be considered during the hiring process, raises the mandatory hiring age cap of new firefighters and mandates Juneteenth as a holiday starting in 2023.

Fitzgerald said the ongoing hazardous material stipend is in recognition "that firefighters do respond rapidly to fires and that we know a lot of the materials in those fires have what we call 'forever chemicals' that could potentially expose our firefighters to hazardous materials.

"We want to keep them safe and we also want to recognize these are serious health concerns that this occupation faces," he said.

(Scott Souza is a Patch field editor covering Beverly, Danvers, Marblehead, Peabody, Salem and Swampscott. He can be reached at Scott.Souza@Patch.com. Twitter: @Scott_Souza.)