Part 1 - A Comedy of Errors

Today, the curtain comes down on the public safety element of the City of Vallejo's Chapter 9 Bankruptcy. IAFF Local 1186 agrees to stipulate to the rejection (rip to shreds and toss into the trash can) of their MOU. This was the goal of the city from the beginning. As a part of the agreement, the city and the union will enter into an accelerated negotiations process to write a new contract. If the negotiations are not successful, mediation and then binding arbitration will be used to get the contract completed. In addition, the firefighters will be allowed to seek damages for the failure of the city to comply with the contract during the bankruptcy process. This could be huge or it could be nothing. It will be something in between.

Originally, there were four unions involved - police, fire, laborers, and office workers. The police and office workers came to a deal with the city earlier this year. The city filed for bankruptcy in May of 2008, after unsuccessfully trying to get substantial concessions out of the four unions.

Based on our database for police only, the City of Vallejo (population 120,000) was shoulder-to-shoulder in pay with two of the other highest paid departments - Oakland and Beverly Hills. Oakland is probably the meanest beat in California and Beverly Hills has a contract that guarantees it first place in Southern California. There does not appear to be any environmental reason for Vallejo to be positioned so high. However, Vallejo's pay for police officers was not obscene or detached from the San Francisco wage market. They were just at the top.

The City of Vallejo was for many years a naval city. It is at the north end of the San Francisco Bay. Being a government town, it also had a large contingent of organized labor - the old hard core East Coast kind. As a result, the city employees developed a similar demeanor. As long as the locally economy boomed, this old school style of employee relations was tolerable.

And then came the closing of the naval operation at about same time as two totally different classes of people in San Francisco and Oakland began to migrate to Vallejo. One was lower income people trying to escape the high cost of living in San Francisco. The other was idealistic "yuppies" seeking a "Starbucks-Whole Foods" utopia. This set into place a set of dynamics that brought the City of Vallejo to the current crisis.

With the success of Vallejo since 1945 came a pervasive political apathy among the citizens. Moving into this vacuum was the city employee unions. The firefighters were particularly active in getting their candidates elected to the city council. This was accomplished with a two pronged plan. One was to spend large sums of money on getting candidates elected and to use punitive actions to silence any opposition on the city council. The unions were able to get binding arbitration which resulted in some decisions that were unpopular with many citizens.

When 2008 arrived in Vallejo, it was a dysfunctional family in a state of crisis. The naval operation was gone, which severely hurt the city's economy. The expansion of Section 8 housing brought more of the criminal element to Vallejo. The yuppies had successful kept the big box stores out Vallejo for the most part. The employee unions had garnered control of the city council. The yuppies had stymied any potential source of new tax revenues. Everybody working for the city, from the janitor to the city manager, was being paid more than what the market would normally dictate. The president of the firefighters union was indulging in his favorite fetish for cracking-the-whip on city officials who did not agree him. He was suing the former city manager and council members for defamation of character. This had become the weapon of choice - the lawsuit.

As the economic tide began turning several years ago, an online publication, "Vallejo Is Burning" , was started by Marc Garman. The site is now named "Vallejo Independent Bulletin" (VIB) and is the main vehicle to attack the employee unions, especially the police and fire. The demeanor of the VIB is like the the guy in the movie "Network" - "I am mad as hell and I am not taking it anymore."

The collision of these dynamics occurred during the first months of 2008:

Loss of naval base

Increase in crime

Blocking of large retailers

Pay rates that were not defendable

A city council majority that was financed by the unions

Frivolous union lawsuits designed to punish the opposition

The VIB on the attack

Political apathy consuming most citizens

A large money pipeline in place for the unions

Years and years of hatred and animosity.

Highly over inflated egos

Lawyers in place willing to prosecute anything for fees

On May 23, 2008, the city goes nuclear and drops the atomic bomb. More to come in Part 2.