IRVINE : City Workers OK Pact Without Raises

City planners, engineers, accountants and computer programmers this week narrowly agreed to accept a labor contract with no pay increase.

Members of the Irvine Professional Employees Assn. approved a contract Tuesday by a five-vote margin, union president Eric Tolles said Thursday. The union was the second city employee group to accept a contract without a raise for 1992.

“It was a very narrow vote to approve this,” said Tolles, a senior plan-check engineer. “Obviously it’s not a wonderful package.”

Some members said they grudgingly approved the contract because they wanted to help the city through the recession, Tolles said. Last month, the larger Irvine City Employees Assn. also agreed to a contract for 1992 that includes no pay increase for workers.

Both contracts are to go before the City Council on Tuesday for approval.

Only the city’s police union, the Irvine Police Officers Assn., is still negotiating its contract for 1992. Police employees have been working without a contract since Jan. 1.

Accepting a contract that includes no pay wasn’t easy for members of the Irvine City Employees Assn., union president Ray Daniel said. Workers wanted a pay increase, he said, but “we tried to help the city by not asking for too much.”

Instead of a pay increase, members of both unions received increases in other employee benefits and changes to employee policies. Both employee groups received an extra eight hours in personal leave, increasing the previous allotment of 24 hours.

Members of the Irvine Professional Employees Assn. will be eligible for $350 a year to attend seminars or other development courses, $100 more than in the prior contract. The city also agreed to make it easier for an employee in an assistant-level position to be promoted to an associate level by not having to compete with all other employees.

Members of the Irvine City Employees Assn. persuaded the city to agree to alter layoff policy by taking seniority into account. If layoffs are needed, managers will have to weigh seniority equally with merit in deciding which employees go.

Both unions also agreed to change the city’s policy to pay employees at levels within the top 25% of levels for similar jobs among other Orange County cities. A committee that met last year to evaluate employee pay criticized the policy as leading cities into a bidding war for workers.

The new policy is to use the median pay in eight similar Orange County cities as a guideline in setting Irvine pay levels. Since the pay of Irvine professional employees is very close to that in the eight other cities, the new policy should have little effect other than alleviating the perception that Irvine’s workers are overpaid, Tolles said.