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But board member says court-ordered meetings for contract not productive.
UNION TWP. – The length and frequency of negotiations has increased to six hours a day, six days a week and the faces have changed, with district lead negotiator attorney Richard Galtman appearing less often and business consultant Al Melone showing up regularly.
But court-mandated Northwest Area teacher contract talks remain largely unproductive and “tense,” board member Al Gordon said Tuesday.
Galtman did not attend negotiations over the weekend, but was present at the Tuesday session. Talks are set to resume Friday, Gordon said.
Galtman’s absence didn’t mark anything ominous, Gordon said, noting it was simply a case of economy.
“We can’t afford to keep paying him to come and sit for six hours. We’re going to use him when we need him,” Gordon said.
Galtman works for the firm of Sweet, Stevens, Katz and Williams based in New Britain, Bucks County, nearly a two-hour drive from Wilkes-Barre, though the firm does have a new office in Pittston.
His charges for negotiations came under fire in March 2008 when a teacher publicly questioned the cost of his services. Galtman released bills at the time showing his firm had charged about $51,000 for work on the teacher union issues from April 2006 to November 2007.
Melone has become a more prominent figure at the negotiations after the school board rejected a tentative agreement hammered out by the negotiating teams last month. The union contends that several board members who approved the agreement during contract talks changed their opinion when it was time to vote in public, and that the reason for the change was a report by Melone regarding the cost of retroactive pay raises.
Retroactive raises are a chief sticking point now that talks have been pushed by Judge Thomas Burke from three times a week to six times a week following the board’s rejection of that agreement.
“We just can’t fund what they want,” Gordon said. “It will leave us a million dollars short and we just can’t justify that.”
Under the terms of the tentative agreement, retroactive raises would have stretched back to the expiration of the last contract in 2005.
The union contends that it has accepted those terms along with the board negotiating committee, and that it is willing to work with the board to arrange a payment schedule for retroactive raises, but that they must be part of a new deal.
Gordon said pushing the payment of retroactive raises into the future wouldn’t make any difference financially. “It’s really a no-go because it would just be on top of any future money we would have to pay.”