Leveling The Bargaining Table

In an economy that offers fewer jobs, higher pressure for greater productivity, and diminishing prospects for long-term job and income security, people turn cautious and a little bit cranky when they do not get a dollar’s value for a dollar spent. And according to a poll conducted in Connecticut last year by the Center for Research and Public Policy, most people think the dollars they spend on property taxes are not well spent.

Poll respondents said the property tax had the largest negative impact on their quality of life by a two-to-one margin over the next least popular state tax, the state income tax. In 2003, Connecticut residents will pay 40 percent of their in-state taxes on local property taxes; state income and sales taxes follow far behind at 29 percent and 20 percent respectively.

Despite such widespread resentment of the property tax, there is no chance for any relief in 2004 for Newtown or any other municipality. The state continues to scale back aid to municipalities, and the towns and cities continue to have little or no control over their biggest expense –– salaries. Last February, when the Board of Finance was prodding the Board of Education for flab in its budget proposal, it was told by Superintendent of Schools Evan Pitkoff that most of the school-proposed $50 million spending plan –– nearly 80 percent –– was salaries and benefits already negotiated with unions. “Fixed costs,” he called them.

With the current three-year teachers’ contract expiring in 2004, Newtown is now heading into another round of contract talks with teachers. And thanks to a state legislature that refuses to address a binding arbitration law for public employee labor negotiations that gives local unions greater leverage in contract talks, teachers can expect to do as well or better than they have in the current contract. Last year, they were awarded net increases of 4.2 percent. This is in a labor market where most workers are accepting negligible or no increases just for the privilege of keeping their jobs.

The state’s binding arbitration law supercedes even a community’s rejection of a public employees union contract and assigns an outside arbitrator to settle the issue. By law, that settlement is based on the community’s ability to pay. Newtown’s negotiators know that they represent the 12th wealthiest town in the state, and they know that a state arbitrator’s interpretation of “ability to pay” not likely to match their own. Arbitrators do not care about tax rates; they are looking at aggregate demographics that hide the harsh realities faced by many Newtown families of modest means whose property tax increases are outpacing their own ability to pay. Since the “last best offer” of the unions is likely to be imposed by state arbitrators, the town’s negotiators are inclined to settle.

We hope this year, the town is more aggressive in its contract talks and the state legislature is more responsive to pleas from towns and cities across the state to fix a binding arbitration law that undermines local control of property tax rates. Communities need to reclaim from the state the right to demand at the bargaining table a dollar’s value for a dollar spent.