Judge Rules for Long Beach on Police Pact : Labor: A Superior Court judge decides that the city can adopt a contract denounced by the union. The move is seen possibly leading to years of legal appeals.

The 10-month-old labor confrontation between city management and the Long Beach police union headed for appeals courts this week when a Superior Court judge ruled that the city can adopt a police contract that the union has repeatedly denounced.

After obviously hoping the city and the union would settle the labor dispute outside of court, Superior Court Judge Dzintra I. Janavs ruled in Los Angeles Wednesday after the City Council rejected the union’s last contract proposal Tuesday night.

The case was sparked by the council’s declaration of an impasse last November when it voted to impose the city’s last contract offer on the union without the union’s consent. Charging that the council was violating its old contract and labor law, the union asked Janavs to stop the city. But Janavs concluded that state law was unclear on the matter and that federal case law indicated the city could end the old contract with reasonable notice and impose a new one.

Union attorney Mike Hannon said he would immediately appeal Janavs’ opinion to the 2nd District Court of Appeal, adding that if the city attempts to enforce the provisions of the new contract, he will ask for a court order blocking such action during appeals. That could be a matter of years, since both sides have said they will appeal the case all the way to the state Supreme Court.

Court rulings notwithstanding, union president Mike Tracy said Wednesday he would continue efforts to settle the unusually strident contract dispute. “We still feel there are steps to be taken in the collective bargaining process. We’ve been getting rejections since March, this is nothing new.”

The city’s impasse declaration formally broke off negotiations between the two sides, but Tracy and city sources say “informal” discussions have occurred between regional labor leaders acting on behalf of the 620-member Long Beach Police Officers Assn. and city officials.

Tracy said the union has drafted several proposals since Christmas, the last of which was presented to the City Council in executive session Tuesday night, when it was rejected. One council member said the proposal was not much different from earlier ones and was turned down without much discussion.

Both sides have talked tough, but both have something to lose if the contract fight is not amiably settled.

The price for the council could be police-backed political opposition. Pro-police candidates have already surfaced in several districts to run against council incumbents in this spring’s local elections. Moreover, Tracy has promised the union will make every effort to get area labor unions to withhold their sometimes generous financial support from incumbents.

“They won’t get our help, they’ll get the back of our hand,” Tracy growled at a union meeting last Friday.

Tracy has even raised the possibility of a police strike as an “absolute last alternative”--a threat discounted by city officials as illegal.

The union, for its part, would take a severe beating if forced to accept the city’s contract offer, which guts a number of long-standing personnel practices prized by officers.

Indeed, Hannon Wednesday characterized the city contract as a “major effort by the city to control the union.”

Under the new city contract, many two-officer cars would be replaced with one-officer cruisers after dark, a proposal the union decries as unsafe. The force would gradually shift from the current four-day work week of 10-hour days favored by officers to a conventional five-day work week. The union would even lose full-time representation, as the union president would no longer be released from police duties to tend to union matters.

Janavs last month ordered the union to hold a membership vote on the city’s last contract offer, made in October. The vote was held last Friday, when slightly more than half of the union membership voted, overwhelmingly rejecting it, 348 to 1. A few members wore new T-shirts, emblazoned with the slogan “Impasse my a . . . . “

“What they told me is . . . they want us to hold the line,” Tracy said after the ballots were counted. Calling the turnout “phenomenally high,” Tracy insisted the vote refuted any talk of a divided membership. Some city officials nonetheless privately suggested that the approximately 270 officers who didn’t vote were silently expressing their discontent with the union’s position.

In the court case, the union argued that a so-called “evergreen clause” in the old three-year contract, which was up for renewal last summer, kept that pact in place until a new contract was agreed to by both sides, thus forbidding the city from unilaterally imposing a new contract.

But Janavs concluded that the clause amounted to a contract with no specific date of expiration. Such a contract, she said, can be terminated by either side with reasonable notice.