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Overcast NIFA orders county to turn over all labor contracts
Control board will not OK new contracts for public employee unions if county noncompliant
While the Nassau Interim Finance Authority made headlines last week when it rejected the county’s proposed 2017 budget, the control board also issued a new directive to the county: provide comprehensive copies of all the county’s labor union contracts or risk NIFA not approving any new agreements with public employee unions.
Many of the contracts in question, including those with the Civil Service Employees Association and Police Benevolent Association, are set to expire at the end of 2017.
According to a NIFA spokesperson, the board, which has had control of the county’s finances since 2011, has been asking for copies of the contracts for the past year.
In a Nov. 29 letter, NIFA Chairman Adam Barsky said that the contracts had previously been approved without NIFA being provided with “a single discreet contract” for each union.
Also, according to the letter, the county failed to respond to any of NIFA’s requests for copies of the contracts except for a large, “multi-volume” set of materials related to the PBA contract, which was not what NIFA “expected or was seeking.”
“To date we have not had any response from the county assuring us that they are working on compiling the terms of all the contracts into the format that NIFA requested,” Barsky wrote.
NIFA indicated in the letter that if the documents were not provided, the control board would deny new or renewed labor contracts when they expire.
Representatives of the Civil Service Employees Association, Police Benevolent Association and Superior Officers Association had not responded to requests for information on the state of their contracts by press time.
Brian Sullivan, president of the Sheriff’s Correction Officers Benevolent Association, said Wednesday that both the association and county have possession of a substantial document containing all contractual information, and that they have not been asked to produce any other information.
County Executive Ed Mangano met with NIFA Wednesday afternoon to discuss the contracts, according to spokesman Brian Nevins.
