Sanitation commissioners will meet to impose contract

In the wake of an overwhelming rejection of a contract recommended by a fact-finder and offered by the commissioners of Sanitary District 7 in Oceanside to district workers, the commissioners will hold a public meeting on Nov. 21, at 7 p.m., at a site yet to be determined in order to hear from both sides of the negotiations and then to impose a contract for 2011, the first year after the expiration of the former contract. The employees have been working without a contract since December 2010.

The Sanitary Board met at its headquarters, at 90 Mott St., early on Oct. 3 to receive a contract offer from Daniel Gatto, the president of Local 854 of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Instead, commissioners were told by their attorney, Anthony Iovino, that even though Gatto had taken a provision calling for sanitation workers to pay a percentage of their health care coverage off the table, they still turned down the contract offer by a 4-to-1 ratio.

On Monday, Gatto said that his members were “upset” at the district’s offer, and turned it down “by a substantial margin.”

“Employees tell me that the count was something like 30 to 7,” Iovino said after the commissioners came out of an executive session. “Even without the health care payments, the union could not sell it to its members. I’ve been told by some workers that they had no idea of what was put in front of them, what the fact-finder’s numbers meant.”

Iovino said that under state labor law, the district commissioners must host a public hearing and impose a contract for 2011. “Then we start all over again,” he said, “negotiating for 2012 and 2013 and subsequent years.”

“The commissioners want to provide relief for the district’s workers, but we can’t get them to come to the table,” Iovino added. “It’s hard for me to understand.”

Gatto said this week that he and his workers would try to avoid the public meeting. “We are in discussion with the commissioners,” he said. “We hope that we will be able to come to an agreement prior to the town meeting, which would then make the meeting moot. Hopefully we can satisfy both the needs of the workers and the district.”

The contract the workers have turned down was based on a series of non-binding recommendations included in a 16-page report issued by state fact-finder Eugene Ginsberg in late July. Among those recommendations was that district workers pay a percentage of their health care costs for the first time.

“It is reasonable for the district to propose employee contributions [to their health insurance costs],” Ginsberg wrote in his report, with the percentage depending on their salaries, but the recommendation was rejected out-of-hand by the workers.

One employee, who asked to remain anonymous because he feared retribution for speaking out in opposition to the board, said shortly after the fact-finder’s report was made public that the workers were angry with both the commissioners and the union. Many workers believed that the report was one-sided, he said, and somehow controlled by the board members.

When the report was released, Gatto told the Herald, “We’re not going to get a better deal anywhere else. I believe that we should take it.”

Now, it appears that the negotiations will have to begin anew.

Any new contract will affect drivers, helpers and laborers. The district currently has 48 union employees.

The sanitary district serves 13,000 households in Oceanside and small portions of Baldwin and East Rockaway, as well as about 950 businesses. It has a budget of $8.65 million.