 |
| The transit union and Escambia County are now playing a high-stakes game of Chicken. If nobody blinks then ECAT riders lose.... |
So with all
the recent drama surrounding ECAT ---and the future of mass transit in Escambia
County seemingly on the brink—I was hopeful after our last meeting on the
subject that the Board could look seriously at bargaining with the drivers in
an attempt to get a realistic work agreement with them which could lead us, possibly, to bringing them back in-house.
After all, the agreement we have with First Transit is ridiculous…..They
get their payment and overhead and fees, they are “made whole” –then THEY get
to go and bargain with the union (and the County has no say in these
negotiations, thank you very much)—and then the County foots the bill for whatever gets
negotiated. We pick up the tab, the
union and drivers win, First Transit wins, and the taxpayers who expect fiscal responsibility lose...
Ridiculous, right?
That’s what I said at the meeting and right
here on this blog. There would have to
be lots of concessions from the drivers on overtime, holiday pay, the pay scale
and how quickly new hires reach the top of it, health insurance subsidies, etc.
etc. There would have to be some
significant changes before this Commissioner, Jeff Bergosh, would ever vote to
bring these drivers in house. But after
the last meeting, and after discussions about getting a better collective
bargaining agreement were had—I felt somewhat confident that we could at least
start the process.
But then
came this letter from the Union’s Lawyer. No dice. Union protections will remain no matter what, end of discussion.
Along with the letter came a
lot of history that explains the strange nature of this evolved agreement that all but
assures that the county MUST have a third party run transit locally.
You can read
it all here— and I encourage you to because it is enlightening---but here’s the
cliff notes:
Any company
that wins the bid to run our transit system (we only had one respond in the last RFP we put out)—or even the County if we chose to
bring the operation in house—is required to honor this 30-year old agreement
which has tremendously onerous provisions that are much too favorable to union members (my
opinion). That’s right—no employee of
the transit system “shall suffer any worsening of his
