State contract offer might signal collective bargaining changes for Iowa

DES MOINES - Signaling the likelihood that the new GOP-led Legislature and Gov. Terry Branstad will revise how public employees are compensated, state negotiators Monday offered unionized law officers 1 percent annual pay raises for the next two years - but made no proposal for insurance benefits.

Branstad told reporters later in the day he would like to explore the option of creating a larger risk pool of public employees at the state, county, city and school district levels that would help keep down costs for entities that participate.

He said Republicans haven't decided whether to change the collective bargaining law to limit the power of public employee unions.

However, Jason Bardsley, a state trooper from Des Moines and president of the State Police Officers Council, said the absence of a proposed insurance benefit in the state's offer for a new contract spanning July 1, 2017, through June 30, 2019, raised concerns over legislative efforts to rewrite or even end Iowa's collective bargaining law, in effect for more than four decades.

'It's very concerning to us. The insurance is a crucial piece of our benefits,” said Bardsley, especially in light of recent police ambush shootings that left officers dead in the Des Moines area and in other U.S. cities.

Janet Phipps, director of the Iowa Department of Administrative Services and lead state negotiator, said red lines were drawn through all current health, life and dental insurance provisions in the offer because those provisions will be decided later.

'The state agrees to provide health and dental benefits as determined by the state to eligible bargaining unit members” reads the wording under the insurance provisions of offer.

'I'm not sure what they're going to do. With the political change, I think there's going to be a conversation about how to deliver group health benefits to state employees,” Phipps told reporters after Monday's collective bargaining session. 'We're not offering any specific plan. Our proposal does say that the state will offer by the state's determination health and dental benefits, but there's nothing delineated in our proposal as it has been in the past.”

Bardsley said the state's proposed 1 percent pay increase was a fair place to begin negotiations after his roughly 600-member bargaining unit first sought a 3 percent increase in each of the next two fiscal years.

Republicans won control of the Iowa Senate in the Nov. 8 election by a 29-19 margin, with one seat held by an independent senator and another vacant seat to be decided in a special election.

The GOP majority in the Iowa House was expanded to 59-41, giving Branstad his first GOP-led Legislature since the 1997-98 biennium.

Newly elected GOP legislative leaders have said it's early in the process of setting an agenda for the 2017 session that begins in January, but they indicated interest in reviewing Iowa's collective bargaining law to provide more flexibility.

The governor has said he believes state employees need to contribute more to insurance costs.

'We're looking at, ‘Is there a better, more efficient way that we can deliver health care?' ” Branstad said during a break in state budget hearings Monday. 'We want to make sure that we provide quality health care for all our employees. But right now it's being done on a very ad hoc basis, not just the state but also school districts, counties, cities. I'd like us to look at could it be much more efficient if we had one master contract as opposed to all of these individual ones. So that's the kind of thing that we're exploring.”

The governor opened his administration's fiscal 2018 budget hearings with state agencies by noting he just returned from a trade mission to Japan and China - where the symbol is the same for both danger and opportunity.

'We have some big budget issues,” he said, noting depressed farm prices and other factors affecting state revenues, 'but we also have the opportunity of doing things differently and better.”

Under current law, state and union negotiators present initial proposals in open session and then go behind closed doors for talks. If an impasse is reached, the two sides go to binding arbitration to resolve differences by March 15.

But that process could be rewritten or scrapped by lawmakers and the governor before the current talks are completed, negotiators said Monday.

Last week, leaders of the conservative Americans for Prosperity-Iowa organization called for collective bargaining reform in Iowa, saying the binding-arbitration system 'allows unelected bureaucrats to spend more taxpayer dollars without lawmakers ever taking a vote.”

Asked if there would be such a move next session, Branstad said 'we haven't decided.”