Council Ends Battle With Police Union : Labor: Both sides call the new contract a “win-win” situation, but it chips away at staffing policies long prized by the officers.

The City Council has ended one of the city’s longest, most rancorous police labor disputes by approving a four-year contract with the police union that chips away at staffing policies long prized by the union.

Though both sides are characterizing the new contract as a “win-win” arrangement, the pact clearly gives management a large foot in the door in terms of altering key personnel policies it insists contribute to the department’s manpower shortage.

Among other things, the new contract scraps the requirement that all nighttime patrol units be staffed with two officers, allowing the department to make as many as half of the night units one-officer cars. And although the contract allows officers to continue working the department’s standard four-day week of 10-hour days if they want to, the police chief will have the option of assigning new hires to five-day weeks.

The labor agreement also reduces the city’s retirement costs--and benefits--for new hires, and makes members of the police union donate time to reimburse the city for releasing the union president from regular police duties.

The one-officer car and four-day workweek issues were among the thorniest in a year of negotiations that quietly went nowhere for the first six months and then accelerated into open warfare that resulted in a lawsuit, threats of a strike, picketing and emotional condemnations from both sides.

The 620-member union, led by a scrappy sergeant who often wears a single pierced earring, succeeded in limiting the extent of the staffing changes while obtaining pay increases in exchange for the take-aways.

“Nobody really won and nobody really lost,” remarked Mike Tracy, president of the Long Beach Police Officers Assn. “The agreement we came up with served both of our masters.” Union members approved the contract last week.

Now that the agreement has been signed, union leaders and city officials are plucking the chords of harmony, saying they want to start mending the strained relations of the past year.

“My hope is we’ll all get back to each doing what we do best,” Councilwoman Jan Hall said.

The labor confrontation was sparked by citywide discontent over police services amid a spiraling crime rate that has become the leading political topic of the spring elections.

Police administrators have said they need as many as 160 more officers, while city management embraced a private consultant’s study that concluded the city’s police shortage would be greatly alleviated if the department would use more one-officer cars and change its workweek.

It was that study, presented to the City Council well after negotiations started last March, that turned the contract negotiations into a knockdown, drag-out fight.

The union found the one-officer car proposal especially appalling, insisting that sending an officer out on the streets alone would be too dangerous.

“We made some major changes here,” Mayor Ernie Kell said, commenting on why the bargaining turned into what Tracy called “the most heated and protracted in the history” of the police union.

As the confrontation dragged on, the pressure mounted for both sides to settle. Last fall, a frustrated and angry City Council took the unusual step of declaring an impasse in the negotiations and voted to force its last contract offer on the union.

The union lost its attempts to block the new work rules while it appealed the council’s action to the state Court of Appeal, and was facing the prospect of having a contract it didn’t like “rammed down its throat,” as Tracy often put it. He was even briefly called back to regular duty and assigned to administrative work, forced to cut his hair and shed his earring. (The appeal will be dropped now that a contract has been signed.)

In the meantime, the union became increasingly hostile to city leaders at a time when the mayor and a number of City Council members were seeking reelection. The union actively supported opponents to council incumbents, and says it will continue to do so in the April 10 local elections. But incumbents expect the union opposition now to be relatively low-key.

The key provisions of the new contract include:

* Pay raises of 5% retroactive to last July followed by raises of 4% to 8% next year and 5% to 8% in 1991, depending on consumer price index increases. Raises for the final year of the contract will be determined later in negotiations.

* Agreement that up to 50% of nighttime patrol units can be staffed by one officer, while those one-officer cars will be “teamed” in twos on their beats. The department has also agreed to maintain a minimum staffing level of patrol units, and will, if necessary, call officers in on overtime to meet those levels. One-officer cars assigned above and beyond the minimum staffing levels will not necessarily be assigned in twos, according to William Storey, the city’s human resources director. Officers who volunteer for the one-officer units at night will be paid an extra 10%.

* Patrol officers who volunteer for a five-day week will be paid an extra 5%, although new hires assigned to the five-day weeks will not receive the added pay.

* The union president will continue to be released full time from police duties to attend to union business, but each union member will donate a few hours of scheduled holiday time each year to reimburse the city.

* The city will cut its retirement contributions to new hires by about two-thirds, according to Storey, putting the police union in line with other city unions already working under a two-tiered retirement system.