When asked for more details on how many people received the bonuses and what the total surplus was from staff vacancies last year, West said the finance department would need to provide that information. She did not say what other unions had raised questions about the bonuses.Ĭity Manager Danielle West said in a text message late Thursday that it was her office, in conjunction with the finance department and the guidance of department heads, that awarded the bonuses in accordance with the city charter, approved budget orders and the city's personnel policies. "We are in receipt of communications from some of the unions and will be meeting with them soon to discuss further," Grondin said. She said the bonuses were for staff who have taken on additional responsibilities and work as a result of those unfilled jobs, and that they did not require City Council approval. The payments came from salary savings from staffing vacancies in the budget year that ended June 30, city spokesperson Jessica Grondin said in a statement Thursday. The bonuses became public at a time when the city just passed a $261.8 million municipal budget with a 5.9% increase in the tax rate and as the city has been challenged by rising costs from inflation, increased homelessness and an influx of asylum seekers, in addition to its staffing woes.ĪFSCME Council 93 represents Portland public works employees in AFSCME Local 481 as well as employees of the Barron Center, the city-run facility that provides long-term care – but the letter was sent at the request of Local 481, said Andy O'Brien, communications director for the Maine AFL-CIO, which shared a copy of the letter with the Press Herald. "This is a clear violation of the collective bargaining agreement as well as established Maine labor law that requires such changes be negotiated with the union." "It has come to the (union's) attention that the City of Portland has awarded bonuses to select members within the bargaining unit without negotiating with the union," reads a letter dated July 14 from the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 93 to the city's labor relations manager. The position was eliminated in 2001 when I retired.A union representing municipal workers in Portland has put the spotlight on $240,000 in merit bonuses the city quietly awarded to certain employees recently, saying the payments violated its collective bargaining agreement and Maine labor law. Sadly, the Internet has cut deeply into newspaper readership (the BDN has fallen from more than 100,000 circulation daily to just 43,000 today) making the kind of job I held in Washington, DC impossible to sustain. I covered the major Washington, DC stories, from Iran-Contra to Bill Clinton's impeachment hearings. I flew around the world with Secretary of State Edmund Muskie, covered national political conventions, reported from Central America in the 1980s and Bosnia in the next decade. My owners spared little expense during my two decades in Washington. I had a competitor and our results were measured every morning on the pages of our newspapers. The BDN experiment worked so well our competition, the Portland newspapers, sent their own reporter to Washington to compete with me, which made my job even more enjoyable. I was a one-man bureau from 1979 to 2001, which required me to be an innovative, self-starter. The owners of the BDN were committed to excellent journalism, to the point they sent me to Washington, DC to cover national politics from a Maine perspective. I went to work there right out of college. The Bangor Daily News is a family-owned newspaper, now a vanishing breed.
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