Police contracts pass

What? No one from the Daily News at last night's City Council meeting?

I don't know, for sure ... I wasn't there ... but I did watch it on TV. Not quite the same, somehow.

The Council last night passed the $10,218 for the new patrolmen and superior officers' contracts that it had rejected last month.

I get the idea behind the rejection: it was all about the state health plan (the Group Insurance Commission, GIC) and a tiered Blue Cross/Blue Shield health plan. The latter won't save the city as much money as the GIC.

I thought Larry McCavitt made some interesting points, the first being that only 17% of communities in the state have actually been able to persuade their bargaining units to accept the GIC. Seventy percent of the bargaining unit membership and retirees in a community have to approve switching to the state plan.

But McCavitt also noted, and as is in today's Globe, that House Speaker Sal DiMasi is telling cities and towns to brace for a 10% cut in state aid in 2009.

Perhaps this news would have helped back when people were voting on the debt exclusion ...

Second in McCavitt's points is that the Council needs to re-think rejecting union contracts. As other councillors also noted, the city leaves itself open for potential law suits based on bad faith bargaining.

Plus, the police union is one of the smaller bargaining units, if I heard correctly. In any case, it can't be as large as the teachers' union.

Still and all, the unit members are only getting a 2% raise, which is pretty small, even in this day and age.