The Sun Sunnyvale's Newspaper Photograph by Scott Lechner At the Jan. 26 meeting, officer Kelly Fitzgerald told council, 'It is my hope that the city manager, the chief and I will leave here tonight with a clear understanding.' Union calls for unity, compromise Meeting marked a shift from aggressive strategy By Justin Berton It was supposed to be a massive show of force by the 200 member-strong Sunnyvale Public Safety Officers Union. It wasn't. It was supposed to be a fiery public reprimand of City Council members. It wasn't. It was supposed to be a call to arms against the city manager. It wasn't. The officers' union appearance at the Jan. 26 council meeting was not all what its website had billed it to be. Instead, union president Kelly Fitzgerald--backed by perhaps 40 plain-clothed union members--offered a tame, brief speech that called for conciliation on all sides. "We have to have compromise. We have to have trust. We have to find a way to deal with the difficult issue of binding rights arbitration," Fitzgerald said. "It is my hope that the city manager, the chief, and I will leave here tonight with a clear understanding that that is what the council would like us to pursue." But Fitzgerald's appeal went largely unanswered. "We will take your comments into consideration so we can get on with resolving problems rather than creating them," Mayor Manuel Valerio said in response. Fitzgerald waited at the podium for a further dialogue from councilmembers, but only received nods and silence. As it stands now, the union and the city's staff have declared an impasse in negotiations and are in the process of selecting an outside panel of advisory arbitrators to help bring an end to the dispute. Whatever resolutions the advisory arbitrators recommend could be upheld or overruled by a majority vote from the city council--a fact that union officials say is inherently unfair to their side. In the meantime, the city staff is conducting a study on the effects of binding grievance arbitration. City manager Robert LaSala said the study would be completed and brought before the council for review in March. But the study itself has raised another point of contention for the union. Fitzgerald asked that union representatives be included in gathering information for the study, but the city manager declined. At the meeting, Fitzgerald again requested union involvement in the study. But LaSala again stated, "We are not planning to engage the association [in the study]" According to its website, the PSOA claimed the meeting would be used to chastise councilmembers who they say offered grievance rights arbitration during the November campaign as a fair compromise. At one time the website claimed union representatives would play videotapes, showing councilmembers breaking their alleged promises. But the union pushed aside the aggressive strategy in an effort to move forward, Fitzgerald said. "I approached them with compromise in hopes to work together, instead of being confrontational. Instead of pointing fingers, we hoped to break the deadlock." The noticeably low turnout by union members was not an indication of wavering support, Fitzgerald added. "We purposely didn't muster the troops to make it appear that we were trying to be confrontational. We didn't want to be intimidating--we wanted to talk. "Unfortunately," he said, "it appears it was useless." [ Back to Contents Page | Sunnyvale Sun Home Page | Archives ] This article appeared in the Sunnyvale Sun, February 3, 1999. ©1999 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.