In the famous words of U2’s Bono, “There’s been a lot of talk… maybe too much talk” and if you visited the Hoboken NJ.com forum last week, the talk’s been getting quite heated on the question of the Police & Fire union negotiations. Now we’re not privy to the conversations between the City and the unions and actually have gone out of our way to avoid it when some information has crossed our path. At the same time, the union negotiations with the police and fire are the obvious very large elephant in the room. After the Finance Director Dan Trasente presented the 2010 budget, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to see where the biggest costs lie in the town’s outlays. With the State billions in the red, the hospital in town on a respirator and its $62 million bond guarantee hanging like the black plague over Hoboken, reality should be recognized by all sides now.
So what prompted the drama to come up in the forum? It seems driven from voices sympathetic to the police and fire employees and oddly, it appears to be getter more shrill than usual and the appearance of almost being orchestrated. At the same time there’s some glimmer of logic discussed about the ratio of supervisors and most interesting some cacophonous fear of arbitration. We’ll probably see the results once the negotiations are complete or an arbitrator is requested to make a final call.
In an editorial last spring in the Times of Trenton, an arbitrator ruled in favor of the State of NJ Jersey:
