Cedar Park Officials Pass 'Best Contract" Ever To City's Firefighters

CEDAR PARK, TX -- City officials said Friday they negotiated "...the best contract terms the city has ever been able to offer our firefighters."

The accomplishment is months in the making, as city officials had been meeting regularly with the Cedar Park Professional Fire Fighters Association-International Association of Firefighters Local 4233 and their state association representative to jointly create contract terms benefiting firefighters.

City Council endorsed the idea convincingly, voting 6-0 at its Oct. 27 regular meeting to extend new terms to the Fire Fighters Association.

“This is, by far, the best contract we’ve ever offered to public safety officials during the time we’ve been doing meet and confer," city council member Cobby Caputo said. "The three-year term is important to me because it gives us a budgeting certainty. I think it’s an amazing offer. This is a really good contract proposal. I think it reflects our prioritization.”

The proposed terms would have a $1.92M cumulative labor cost impact to the City budget over the next three years. The Fire Department’s FY 17 personnel budget is currently $7,888,530, representing 25.5 percent of the City’s General Fund personnel budget. The cumulative cost impact is delineated as follows:

Council Member Corbin Van Arsdale said “Public safety is one of the most important thing we do as a city and the City spends more than half the budget doing that. This puts another almost 2 million dollars into that, as checks to Fire Fighters.”

Under the new proposed terms, the typical five-year Fire Fighter in the Cedar Park Fire Department would receive a wage increase of 15.1 percent over the next three years to his or her base pay, plus additional pay for specialized assignments (such as hazardous materials, technical rescue, wildland, arson and dive team), education/certification, and Spanish/sign language certification. Furthermore, the new contract provides for alternative dispute resolution and automatic payroll deduction of union dues.

Currently a typical five-year Fire Fighter makes $53,294 plus education/certification compensation. Under the new labor agreement his or her base pay would automatically raise to $55,426 this January. By 2019 this same Fire Fighter, who will by then have eight years’ tenure, would make $61,342 base pay plus incentives.

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