Citizen comment:
Most people were there to talk about the repeal of Meet & Confer, and the implementation of the Hartmann reforms. We’ll get to that shortly. A few people were there to talk against the SMART Terminal, or about the sprinkler systems in the new fire codes.
Items 23 and 25: Repeal of Meet & Confer
First item of the day!
Background
How did we get here? Most unions are legally hamstrung in Texas, but cops and fire fighters unions are privileged. They’re allowed to bargain collectively. The San Marcos PD union is SMPOA.
Every year, SMPOA negotiates a contract with the city, through a process called Meet and Confer. They’ve done this since 2009. So each year, they build on last year’s contract, and then they add a little. Each side gives a little and each side gets a little. How nice for cops.
In theory, the city is bargaining on behalf of the people San Marcos. Last summer, Mano Amiga put forth a list of reforms. The city ignored the reforms and passed a meet-and-confer contract without them.
So Mano Amiga vowed to repeal the meet-and-confer agreement. They rounded up 1300 signatures and submitted a petition to repeal the meet-and-confer agreement. That petition is the issue of the night.
So what are the proposed reforms? Here’s their graphic:
They are all fairly reasonable. (Honestly, if you want to understand the Hartman Reforms, go listen to minutes 8:00-25:00 of this video. It’s the citizen comment period of the January 17th City Council workshop, and members of Mano Amiga show up and explain each reform. I found it super helpful.)
(Background on who Ryan Hartman is and how he killed Jennifer Miller by driving drunk and later got in trouble for excessive force, for tazing a compliant community member and was eventually fired, under immense pressure from Mano Amiga.)
Onto Tuesday’s meeting.
The Hartman Reforms are not actually on the table tonight. It’s only about whether or not to repeal the current Meet-and-Confer agreement.
Council has two options:
- Undo the contract and return to negotiations, or
- Send it to the voters.
Right off the bat, Mark Gleason moved to deny, and Matthew Mendoza seconds it. Not a good start.
Next, the Director of San Marcos HR gives a presentation: Basically, if the entire Meet-and-confer agreement was burned to the ground, the default agreement is called the Civil Service agreement. The Civil Service agreement is very weak and lacks a lot of good parts to our current agreement. We’d be very sad to burn it all down, because we’d lose 14 years worth of negotiations. But that’s the choice before council tonight: keep the current agreement, or burn it all down and feel really sad about it.
This is so dumb that I found it confusing at first. Why are we talking about burning anything down? Mano Amiga doesn’t care about burning down the past 14 years of negotiations. They just want to add in five extra conditions, on top of the past 14 years.
But the HR director was fixated on the idea that repealing Meet-and-Confer meant that the past 14 years of foundational agreements will instantly be tossed in the trash. “These poor Mano Amiga shmucks don’t realize they’re playing with fire! Once you realize what’s at stake, you surely won’t throw away the entire negotiation!”
For example, this was the slide used for most of the presentation:
Over and over again, different staff members say things like, “All of the accountability structures in the current agreement that you all really like, will go away if you repeal” and “Without meet-and-confer, we won’t be able to hire retired cops on a part time basis for Blue Santa anymore.”
Saul Gonzalez, Matt Mendoza, and Jude Prather all ask questions comparing the current 2022 Meet-and-Confer agreement with the burn-it-all-down Civil Service agreement.
- Saul asks if the chief has more power to discipline cops under the 2022 agreement than under the Civil Service one?
Answer: Yes! So much better!
Then an interesting thing happened: At 1:23, Saul asked, “Negotiations are supposed to be a win-win for both sides. Let’s say it gets rescinded. There’s things the other side wants and things that we want. It could change a little bit. It’s not guaranteed that it’s all going to go away? It’s going to benefit our interests as well as theirs.”
I think Saul is asking, “Are we allowed to build on the current agreement? If both sides want that, it doesn’t have to go away, right?”
But here’s how it’s answered: “When we meet-and-confer, we use interest-based bargaining, where we all talk about an issue. Both sides come with a list and we work as a team. We get our issues lists from council. Then it’s a give-and-take to come to an agreement.” That’s an answer to an entirely different question. It’s an answer about the normal summer process, not about whether or not we will be forced to burn down 14 years of negotiations if we vote to rescind
- Matthew Mendoza asks if a cop can drag out arbitration forever?
Answer: No. Both sides have to agree to arbitration.
- Jude Prather says, “So there are lots of good things in Meet and Confer?”
The city manager, Stephanie Reyes, steps in. A lot of the good things in Meet and Confer have been there ever since 2009! Therefore if we rescind it, we’d be going back to square one.” ….[ominous music plays]
Finally, Alyssa Garza is the one who untangles the mess. She point blank asks, “Let me see if I’ve got this straight. The fear is that if we rescind, we think SMPOA will erase the whole agreement?” and basically points out that that’s nonsensical. “Why wouldn’t they start from where they are?”
Stephanie Reyes says, “Well, it’s a bargaining process. They’ll expect something in return.”
That’s a very different argument! Sure, if we re-enter negotiations, they’ll ask for something in return. That’s how negotiations work. Nowhere does that imply burn-it-all-down.
Next Chase Stapp speaks up: The reason that the city ignored the Hartman reforms last summer is because Mano Amiga missed a key deadline. The city had already submitted its lists of interests by May 27th. The Hartman reforms didn’t come out until June 10th.
Alyssa speaks pointedly: council regularly does whatever the hell it wants. If we’d wanted to negotiate the Hartman Reforms, we would have negotiated the Hartman reforms. The fact is we ignored them and hoped they’d go away. (She says it far more diplomatically, at 1:37:15 if you want to watch.)
That was pretty much the entire discussion! Even though I knew the outcome already, it still felt like Alyssa was the only person fighting for repeal.
And yet….
The vote:
Deny the petition: Mark Gleason, Jane Hughson, Matthew Mendoza
Repeal Meet-and-Confer: Alyssa Garza, Saul Gonzalez, Shane Scott, and Jude Prather
I still feel shocked and elated! There was no advance warning in the discussion at all that Saul, Shane, and Jude were listening and open-minded on this topic. Complete surprise to me, at least!
Saul and Jude give brief justifications after the vote:
- Saul says he’d rather renegotiate before giving up, and maybe we can come up with a win-win for everyone.
- Jude says that under the constitution, citizens have a process to file a grievance against government, and since Mano Amiga used that process, they should get to see due process followed.
After the dust settles, Mark Gleason speaks up again. He just wanted this to go to the voters. He finds it highly ironic that Mano Amiga is being so inconsistent. They wanted Prop A on marijuana decriminalization to go to the voters, but now they want to skip the voters and go straight to renegotiations. So ironic! His contempt for Mano Amiga is palpable.
But let’s take his words at face value for a sec: Mark is being a twat. Mano Amiga is fighting for police and criminal justice reforms. They’re not dedicated to the ballot box per se. If council had decriminalized marijuana, they wouldn’t have wept over the lack of a public vote. If council had voted to send this to a vote, they would have geared up for a fight.
Anyway, big congratulations to Mano Amiga for all their hard work and persistence. Of course, the Hartman Reforms are not actually part of any contract yet. I have no idea how the renegotiations will play out.
….
One last thing: Matthew Mendoza seems to be positioning himself as a yes-man to Mark Gleason, who himself is a yes-man to Jane Hughson.
Confidential to Matthew (if I may call you Matthew): you’ve picked the Dwight Shrute of the bunch to emulate. Maybe back away slowly and reconsider someone a little less authoritarian and preachy?
The San Marxist 