Costa Mesa OKs $24.7 million employee contract

The Costa Mesa City Council signed off on an employment contract with the city’s largest employee union Tuesday, ending more than a year of negotiations.

Under the $24.7-million pact with the Costa Mesa City Employees Assn., new hires will come in under a lower-tier system while existing employees maintain the bulk of their benefits and salaries.

After a public hearing Tuesday and another Sept. 2, the four council members approved the deal. Councilwoman Sandy Genis was absent.

The contract, which lasts through June 2016, mandates a 10% reduction in pay from current rates for new employees while also reducing sick pay and vacation hours from 92 to 40 in their first year of employment.

The roughly 200-member CMCEA ratified the contract earlier this summer. The negotiations involved about a dozen sessions that fell under the guidelines of the Civic Openness in Negotiations ordinance, or COIN.

Jennifer Muir, spokeswoman for the Orange County Employees Assn., which represents CMCEA, said the group would love to consider the negotiations as the start of something new.

“City Council members have called this agreement the beginning of a new chapter in the relationship between the city and its employees,” she said in an email. “CMCEA and its members are cautiously hopeful that this ‘new chapter’ becomes a reality, one that ushers in a period of true collaboration and mutual respect, and signals an end to the demoralizing attacks on their value to the city.”

Under COIN, the city had its own negotiator, attorney Richard Kreisler. The ordinance also calls for each side’s offers to be made public and subject to financial analysis.

CMCEA’s new contract is estimated to save at least $950,000 over the last one, which expired in March 2013. It also claims additional savings through the future outsourcing of city street-sweeping services.

Mayor Pro Tem Steve Mensinger thanked the association “for doing the right thing” and called the agreement a win for the city and workers.

Mensinger also credited COIN and its reform-like qualities for bringing out details about negotiations for the first time. He acknowledged that the process cost both sides money.

“I want to state the process itself worked, as planned,” Mensinger said. “The point of COIN is simply to educate; that’s it.”

Councilwoman Wendy Leece commended the process.

“It’s the end of a long road and the beginning of a new road,” she said. “I hope the spirit of cooperation will continue.”

Robin Leffler, president of Costa Mesans for Responsible Government (CM4RG), was critical of the contract but complimentary of Kreisler.

“Thanks to him, probably, there was no blood on the floor,” she said.

Leffler added that the contract’s cuts “went pretty far into the pocketbooks of employees who are not well-paid.”

Councilman Gary Monahan noted that the average total compensation package — salary and benefits — for CMCEA employees is about $105,000.

“Personally, $105,000, I don’t see that as low-paid,” Monahan said.

No layoffs are being proposed with the plans to outsource street sweeping.

The CMCEA’s lawsuit contesting the 2011 council decision that could have laid off more than 200 employees — roughly half the city’s workforce — has yet to be resolved. The council has since rescinded the pink slips sent out at that time.