The Police Collective Bargaining Agreement

At the recent special town meeting, four of the six members of the finance committee voted no on the proposed collective bargaining agreement.  Their reasons included that the agreement was unclear in many areas, including the most important area:  What do the police officers get paid and what raises do they get?   Here's why.

Below is the actual page from the agreement.  You might think there was language following the table explaining how it is to be applied.  You would be wrong.

How do these numbers apply and to whom?  There's no explanation. What's the meaning of "Hiring Level A" or any of the others?  There's no explanation.  Do these specified levels mean  officers can only be hired (and paid) at one of the specified salaries?   It would be easy to just say that, but it doesn't.  There's language on the next page that reads "The Board of Selectmen reserves the right to hire experienced part-time officers at level C as long as they do not exceed part-time employees on the seniority list, and the Board also reserves the right to place new full-time experienced officers at a pay scale appropriate to their level of experience up to Level C."  I've read that sentence 25 times and still can't make sense out of it.  Does its existence mean that the numbers in the table only apply to new hires, not to existing officers?  And if the Board "reserves the right" to hire part-timers at level C, the clear implication is that they can't hire part-timers at any other level.  Is that what it means? Or does it mean "no higher" than level C?  It could have said that but it doesn't.  For full-timers, does it mean that level C is the highest level they can be hired at?  It could just say that but it doesn't.

Let's say the intention of the agreement is to provide for minimum and maximum pay levels for officers and to provide for each officer to be paid one of the specified amounts.  (Of course, we have to imply that because the agreement - rather astonishingly - doesn't say it.) And let's suppose that there is an existing officer who was paid about $39,000 for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2013.  Presumably he is to get a raise up to $39,839 for FY 2014, but how does he know, or anyone know, that he's in "Hiring Level B"?  Maybe there's a record somewhere that he was designated to that level when he was hired, but the levels in past agreements were designated by numbers (1, 2, 3, etc.), not letters, so there won't be any such record.  And even if there were a clear record, the agreement uses the word "hiring" for each level, indicating the schedule is only for new officers, because it would have been easy to just leave out that word if the idea was to name each existing officer to a specified pay level. 

And what's the point to these specific numbers, rather than just minimums and maximums?  Do they mean the selectboard can't hire an officer at, say, $42,000 exactly?  What's the point of that?  What if an officer wants to forego, say, the uniform cleaning allowance in exchange for an extra $300 in wages?  That can't be done under the agreement?

The sentence following the table is a real mystery.  The first part of the sentence says an officer will get a raise each fiscal year by moving laterally (meaning from left to right) - which incidentally leaves no room for any merit raises.   But then the sentence uses the word "and." So does that "and" mean the officer moves laterally only if he also gets an acceptable annual performance rating?  (As you might suspect by now, there's nothing in the agreement telling you when the annual performance review takes place, who does it, or what an "average rating of 3 or better" means.)  If that was the intention, it should have said "but only if," not "and."  The alternative meaning is that the officer gets two raises, one on July 1 and one on getting an acceptable performance rating.  But that can't be right, because there's only one specified dollar amount for each fiscal year.  So does the sentence mean that if an officer doesn't get an acceptable performance review, he stays at the old fiscal year wage?  If so, what happens the next year?  If he gets an acceptable review, does he then leapfrog up to the 2016 wage rate? 

No lawyer worth his or her salt would allow these ambiguities in a contract, especially in the most important provisions, namely the wage schedules.  The voters should have told the selectboard to go back and get it right.