Simi Valley Votes to Withhold Pay Raises for Police Dispatchers

SIMI VALLEY —  Hoping to negotiate another substantial pay raise in their upcoming labor contract, police dispatchers persuaded city officials to base their salary on a survey of similar employees in other cities.

But the tactic backfired when the city determined that Simi Valley’s dispatchers are overpaid.

As a result, the City Council voted late Monday to withhold two 1.5% annual pay raises that the current contract would have guaranteed to the 13 dispatchers--had their union not succeeded in forcing a salary study to be conducted.

This dispute began during the last contract, which expired in June.

Simi Valley workers covered by Service Employees Union International Local 998 complained they were being paid less than similar employees in other cities. And they won the city’s agreement to study salaries and negotiate wage adjustments to bring the Simi workers’ salaries up to par with workers in other cities.

City labor negotiators looked at wages for sewer workers, street sweepers, secretaries and other municipal employees in Thousand Oaks, Camarillo, Ventura, Burbank and San Fernando, then measured them against Simi Valley’s city salaries.

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The study also reexamined job descriptions to make sure they accurately reflected each employee’s work and any new skills they might have learned since being hired.

And on Monday night, the City Council agreed to raise salaries for about 70% of Simi Valley’s 240 SEIU members by an average of three-quarters of 1% this year, and the same amount next year, on top of the 1.5% annual raise already guaranteed in each year of the contract.

Raises for those employees, who include sewer workers, secretaries and street maintenance workers, take effect in the coming pay period, Mayor Greg Stratton said.

But Stratton said the council also decided to freeze salaries for the police dispatchers and a handful of other employees who were being paid more than the average salary found in the study.

“The good news is that a lot of people are going to get a raise,” he said Tuesday. “The bad news is that the dispatchers not only are not going to get a raise but we found out they were being overpaid. Nobody was going to get their salaries cut, but they don’t get a raise.”

Stratton said the dispatchers have complained that they should not be shut out of raises they were guaranteed by contract.

“I understand why they’re miffed,” Stratton said. “On the other hand, we did give them an 8% raise a couple of years back,” when a similar salary study found the dispatchers then were severely underpaid.

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Dispatchers who were on duty at the Simi Valley Police Department declined to comment Tuesday afternoon, except to say their shop steward was out of town and could not be reached.

The 8% raise the dispatchers won two years ago made them the highest-paid emergency dispatchers in Ventura County, said SEIU President Barry Hammitt, whose union represents government employees throughout the county.

Hammitt said he sees reason on both sides of the dispute.

“It’s hard to take a position,” he said. “What are the alternatives? The alternatives as you go through them are: do you throw out the class and [comparable worker] study for everybody, which means those people who are under the market [average] don’t get brought up? A second alternative is we’ll reduce everybody who’s making more than the market to the market level. That’s probably not an acceptable answer, either. The third would be to say you don’t care about what the study says. There’s not any real winners out of it.”

As for the lost raises, Hammitt said the city could have chosen to knock the dispatchers and other overpaid employees down about 3% to the market level, then give them two 1.5% raises that would have brought them back up--ending in the same net result as the freeze.

“If you look at it from a different vantage point, what you’re really saying is if you’re 3% over market, we’ll let you keep that rate,” he said. “And you’ll stay where you are until the market catches up with you.”