One more try at a contract

The Eugene School District and the Eugene Education Association will give it one more shot today, hoping to reach a deal on a new contract before the fiscal year ends on June 30.

The goal is to find consensus on employee concessions for the third straight year to help the district balance a 2011-12 budget with a record shortfall of $21.7 million.

The district and the teachers’ union will return to the bargaining table at 8:30 a.m. “We’ll continue to negotiate until we have a result,” said Christine Nesbit, the district’s associate human resources director and lead negotiator.

The expectation is that today’s session would be the last until late summer. Any deal achieved after June 30 would have to be retroactive.

When the previous bargaining session ended about 3 a.m. on June 9, with the sides closer than ever to reaching a deal, there was no additional session scheduled.

But district officials, including soon-to-retire Superintendent George Russell, asked the union to give it one more try.

“I know folks’ schedules are tight, but is there any way we can have one more meeting?” Russell said he asked teachers last week during his monthly get-together with union members.

Tom Di Liberto, Monroe Middle School teacher and EEA bargaining chairman, said the union wasn’t averse to another meeting but was finding it hard to juggle everyone’s schedule.

Besides, “We told the district this is pretty much as far as we could go, and the district said the same thing,” Di Liberto said of the last bargaining session. But the EEA decided it was worth another try, Di Liberto added.

“We want a contract, and I know 4J wants a contract,” he said. “And we hope we can get it (today).”

Without an agreement, the layoff picture for teachers and other district employees may only get bleaker. The district has already given tentative pink slips to 122 of its teachers — more than 10 percent of the staff.

The district is also negotiating with its other two main employee groups — classified workers and administrators —and failure to reach a deal with all three means the district could face $5.5 million in expenses it does not have money for without making more cuts, Nesbit said.

Without concessions, the district is faced with dipping further into its reserves, laying off more staff or cutting more programs. The 2011-12 budget approved by the school board Wednesday assumes $4.5 million in employee concessions or further staff reductions.

The bulk of those concessions would come from the largest union, the EEA. The sides are close — in fact, are in agreement — on several proposals, including a 185-day work year for teachers that would include seven unpaid furlough days (the same as 2010-11), no cost-of-living salary increases, and 50 percent “step” funding (1.85 percent of salary) on July 1 for eligible employees, and a return to full step funding on July 1, 2012. Step increases reward levels of teacher experience.

But differences that look small on paper will have to be rectified today to strike a deal.

For example, although both sides are now proposing no cost-of-living salary increase, the district’s last offer on the table included a stipulation that the district would no longer treat contributions to a tax-sheltered annuity, or TSA, as subject salary under the state’s Public Employees Retirement System and Oregon Public Services Retirement Plan. The district has to pay into PERS, the state’s pension fund for public employees, on TSAs, Nesbit said. A typical TSA for a teacher with 10 years of experience can equal $1,800 a year, with PERS payments on top of that, she said. When computed districtwide, that’s a $250,000 cost, Nesbit said.

Meanwhile, the teachers’ last proposal on the table included a different stipulation to the no cost-of-living salary increase: one-time $600 payments to all EEA members on Feb. 1, 2012.

That would cost the district about $700,000, Nesbit said. “I don’t know where (that money) would come from, and it’s a huge economic item,” she said.

Although closer now, the two sides also still differ on the monthly health insurance contribution to be provided by the district for EEA members. The district has proposed keeping it at the current $1,100 a month. The union has proposed an increase to $1,125, down from its original proposal of $1,160 a month.

Although $25 a member might not seem like a lot, it adds up to $325,000 a year in cost, “year after year after year, into forever,” Nesbit said.

The union opened the last bargaining session with a two-year concession proposal, but was told by district negotiators that they didn’t have school board authority to negotiate a two-year pact. Two years is too risky for the financially unstable district, said Nesbit, unless the agreement were to contain a “reopener,” allowing the district to come back to the table again before the two years is up.

But “if there are a bunch of contingencies in there, it kind of defeats the purpose” of a two-year contract, Di Liberto said.