In June of this year, the Bronson administration was warned that city maintenance and snow removal would fail due to unfilled positions and low wages, and nothing was done about it.
Jason Alward, District Representative for International Unit of Operating Engineers Local 302, spoke to Assembly members at a committee meeting this morning about the difficulty of hiring equipment operators at the low wages offered by the city.
According to Alward, the union currently has 258 heavy equipment operators on an out-of-work list who are ready to work but wages are too low to generate interest in the positions. Currently, starting wages for heavy equipment operators are $21.23 an hour. This is after workers obtain a Commercial Drivers License that costs $7,000 and takes three weeks to obtain.
“With inflation, fuel and these really out of date wages, filling these positions is nearly impossible. We’ve asked the city to do a wage study on these classifications for the last two contract cycles and nothing’s been done,” Alward said. “We have this shortfall in the city and there’s no excuse for it.”
The Municipality entered contract negotiations with union representatives in June of this year. Municipal Attorney Blair Christensen and other department heads were involved, including when Alward warned about a high number of vacancies, and the need to do something about it. The department is down about 20% in staffing, and only has six of its 12 seasonal equipment operator positions filled.
“Recently we negotiated a successor agreement with the city and explained the trend that we were seeing with shortages and that the city needed to do something about it,” Alward said in the meeting. “I literally told them that this was probably the most significant time since the pipeline to do something about the problem they had and nothing was done.”
Alward went on to discuss how recently the Department of Transportation was unable to fill 16 critical vacancies at the Ted Stevens International Airport. He said that, as the third-busiest cargo hub in the world, the vacancies were catastrophic for them and expressed that the airport cannot fail. They were eventually able to fill these positions with a 30% wage increase.
“It’s really about priorities,” Alward said. “We have some serious problems within the city and if this is a priority, things can be done about it.”
Alward pointed out that the city can subcontract the work out and if they did so, they would hire contractors who would make much higher wages than what they are offering city employees. Mayor Dave Bronson is, in fact, bringing in private contractors to assist in snow removal, including McKenna Brothers Paving Co., who donated over $75,000 to Bronson’s campaign for mayor.
