This series of open letters to the City Council highlights important issues impacting city workers, including unfair wages, wasted taxpayer funds, and longstanding racial inequities.
Absent City Council
March 23, 2022
Mayor Stewart and City Councilmembers,
We’re writing to share important information about wage negotiations, city budget issues, and the steps you could take to ensure fair wages, safe working conditions, and racial equity for all city employees.
City Budget
We watched the budget presentation during the March 16 Council meeting, and we’re glad that City Manager Jamal Fox and several Councilmembers promised that any personnel cuts would be a last resort only after other budget cuts were made. But that is only a small part of the picture.
We want to thank Councilmember Terry Seamens for saying wage increases need to be factored into budget planning for the 2022-23 fiscal year. It’s been an ongoing problem where the prior and current city management arbitrarily pick a low wage increase without any agreement from the city’s unions or even the City Council. This approach inevitably leads to unnecessary confrontation, time-consuming negotiations, and direct action campaigns to build community support from city residents. We have no desire to continue this combative approach during an election year, and we hope you don’t either.
The FY 23 budget shouldn’t be finalized or voted upon until after wage agreements are approved with both unions. The current CPI inflation rate is 7.9% so any wage increase less than that rate would effectively be a pay cut for city employees in the midst of a competitive job market. Most of our members are people of color who are working near the bottom of the City’s pay scale, so you will be ignoring the Council’s commitments to racial equity if you don’t push for fair wages.
Wage Studies and Vacant Positions
The budget also needs to include adequate funding to raise the City’s historically low wages to comply with the City’s wage study and our own wage study. Economists at AFSCME are analyzing comparable wages, and we can present the findings at a future Council meeting. The City’s wage study is narrow in scope and won’t truly reflect the prevailing economic conditions locally and across the United States.
The City’s wage study also won’t consider the lasting harms and economic damage caused by the large number of vacant positions and the ongoing failure to fill them. More than $589,000 in salaries and benefits were lost in FY 21 alone because many positions were left unfilled. The direct result was more exhausting work forced onto the backs of the remaining city workers with no additional compensation or promotions. Those actions by the Council and city management severely impacted the physical and mental health of our members during a global pandemic and caused some resignations, which further exacerbated the number of vacant positions and increased the City’s hiring and training costs.
The City’s wage study, which was touted last year by Mayor Stewart and several Councilmembers as a means of ensuring pay equity, isn’t going to be accurate or complete. The study isn’t examining whether employees’ current job duties align with their job descriptions, so comparisons to similar job descriptions in other jurisdictions won’t be accurate apple-to-apple comparisons. As a result, many employees most likely will be shortchanged despite their additional work duties.
In the City’s prior wage study four years ago, city employees completed a detailed survey about their work duties so accurate comparisons could be made. Despite our repeated requests, the City’s current wage study won’t include a similar survey or any steps to address these issues. Mr. Fox also prohibited us from meeting with the wage study contractor to share these legitimate concerns.
City Worker Survey
To address these problems, we will be conducting a survey of our members about their work duties and working conditions, and we can share this report at a future Council meeting. It will be your only unvarnished view of low morale and financial hardships experienced by city employees. You will just receive a one-sided, blinkered account of these issues from city management during your March 23 closed meeting on union negotiations where the public aren’t allowed to attend or hear what is said.
Wasting Taxpayer Funds on Legal Fees
Since budget cuts are being sought, the City Council could help by voting to eliminate the use of an outside attorney who is paid $250 per hour to negotiate on union issues. This costly approach, which was inherited from the former city manager, has needlessly wasted many thousands of taxpayer dollars. You should ask Mr. Fox for the total sum, and you’ll be shocked by the amount. Those funds could have been used to help pay fair wages to city employees.
Mr. Fox should negotiate directly with us so we aren’t playing a game of telephone through an attorney with his own financial stake in the proceedings. We don’t bring a union attorney to these negotiations so there’s no justifiable reason for an unlevel playing field. Mr. Fox and Human Resources Director Tracy Smith also could help build trust by not ignoring our emails on important issues facing all city employees.
Break the Silence
Open communication is key so we hope you will break your long silence and meet with us.
Would you trust or respect someone who refuses to speak to you or answer your emails? Imagine if a fellow Councilmember or a colleague treated you that way. How would it make you feel?
We have offered many times to meet with each of you, and there’s nothing preventing you from doing so. The city manager works for you, not the other way around, so he can’t ban you from doing the right thing and hearing employees’ concerns on important issues that are being ignored.
We have no desire for confrontation with the Council or city management during an election year. Neverending wage negotiations, employee grievances, and costly arbitrations are extremely stressful and time-consuming. We’re volunteers who aren’t paid $250 per hour so we have no incentive to drag them out. We are a gardener and an arts coordinator who are risking retaliation to speak up for our fellow city workers. You should speak up for all of us as well.
We truly hope you won’t ignore this letter. Please let us know what concrete actions you will take to address these issues. We also would like to schedule a time to meet with each of you. We hope we can count on your help to forge a new path that is more fair and equitable for all city workers.
Best,
Sean Hendley, AFSCME Local 3399 President
Brendan Smith, AFSCME Local 3399 Acting Vice President
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March 7, 2022
Open Letter About Unfair and Inequitable Application of City of Takoma Park Policies
Mayor Stewart and City Councilmembers,
As leaders of AFSCME Local 3399, we are writing to share our concerns about the unfair and unequal application of the City of Takoma Park’s vaccination policy and telework policy.
Our union is committed to the health and safety of all city employees and the public. We didn’t oppose the enactment of the Covid vaccination policy, and we have been sharing vaccination information and resources with our members. We also support the policy’s requirement that employees who are approved for religious or medical accommodations won’t face disciplinary action if they undergo weekly testing.
Our dialogue earlier this year with city management about this policy seemed fruitful, as we were operating under an assumption of good faith that accommodation requests would be considered fairly on an individual basis. Instead, City Manager Jamal Fox has violated the City’s own policy, as well as federal protections against religious discrimination, by coercing three BIPOC union members into resigning and suspending three other BIPOC members who are slated to be fired this week because their requests for religious accommodations were denied. All three of the remaining employees are willing to comply with the policy’s requirement for weekly testing of unvaccinated employees and to keep wearing masks even when they are no longer required.
In his denial of their class-action grievance, Fox admitted “the City did not question the sincerity of the employees’ stated religious beliefs,” but he claimed their requests would pose an “undue hardship” by compromising workplace safety. However, he approved a medical accommodation request for another city employee even though the alleged workplace safety issues are the same.
Because of this unfair and unequal treatment, the City has lost the skills and decades of experience of three longtime city employees and stands to lose three more who are now pursuing religious discrimination complaints with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Until the EEOC reaches a decision on this matter, these three employees will be without a job. They are a single mother, a new father who just returned from paternity leave to receive notice of his suspension, and a woman whose husband recently lost his job under similar circumstances. They are human beings, with material concerns and needs that they’ve weighed in their decision not to compromise on their firmly held beliefs, as the City who they’ve given a portion of their lives to callously makes an example of them.
We believe that all City Workers should have a voice in the implementation of any policy or procedure that is supposedly invoked for their protection. Not only are we losing six longtime coworkers, but in their wake the rest of us are left scrambling with additional work duties and no additional compensation, all because of the heavy-handed and inequitable implementation of this policy by city management. It's a cynical repeat of the unfair workload shifted onto the shoulders of city employees during the pandemic because many positions were left vacant even though city funding was available to fill them. The City still has many vacant positions and is having trouble finding applicants because of the low wages that are being offered.
City management also has failed to show any compassion in the application of the telework policy. Our union is representing a Black female city employee with more than a decade of work experience in an arbitration after Fox inexplicably denied her request for six days of telework. Just six days of telework which would cost the city nothing. She needed to telework because she is a single mother who had to quarantine on two separate occasions because her child was exposed to positive Covid cases in the City’s own aftercare program at the Community Center.
Even though her supervisor and department director supported this minimal amount of telework, Fox has wasted thousands of taxpayer dollars by paying an outside attorney $250 per hour to fight her reasonable request in a costly arbitration. Many employees in both the public and private sectors, including some Councilmembers, are still teleworking fulltime, but city management is targeting one single mother over six days of telework to send a message to other city employees not to challenge city policies.
After our contentious wage negotiations last year, we have sought a more positive relationship with city management and the City Council, but the continued disregard for employees’ rights in these matters shows that old habits die hard.
We hope that Mayor Stewart and all Councilmembers will show some courage and speak up for city employees. Silence is the voice of complicity, and the silence from each of you during the wage negotiations last year was resounding. It has left lasting echoes both for city employees and many city residents who support fair wages and equitable treatment for city employees regardless of their religious beliefs.
Our requests to meet with each of you about our concerns have been repeatedly ignored, but you can’t ignore the harsh realities that city employees are facing. You are hearing a one-sided and biased conversation from city management which doesn’t reflect the true working conditions and low morale of city employees.
Our offer to meet with each of you to talk about our concerns is still on the table. We also are sharing this open letter with city residents and county, state, and federal representatives to keep them informed.
Best,
AFSCME Local 3399 President Sean Hendley
AFSCME Local 3399 Acting Vice President Brendan Smith
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Nov. 9, 2021
The Takoma Park City Council doesn’t want to pay a 5.4% cost-of-living increase to city employees, but they are planning to double their own salaries.
Takoma Park Mayor Kate Stewart and the City Council will vote on an ordinance this Wednesday that would increase the mayor’s salary by 108% and the Councilmembers’ salaries by 102%. They also would receive fulltime city employee benefits even though their positions are part-time. Both their pay and benefits would spiral higher than local governments in neighboring cities with larger populations.
The increased compensation package would cost the city up to $335,000 per year for just seven people and would go into effect after the city elections next year. Mayor Stewart and any Councilmembers who are re-elected next year will reap large financial gains for their votes for the ordinance now.
About 80 City of Takoma Park employees are members of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 3399. Most of our members are Black or Hispanic, and we keep the city running every day. We’re so ingrained in the fabric of this community that local residents often take us for granted. We are the trash collectors, librarians, crossing guards, custodians, gardeners, police dispatchers, and other workers providing most city services.
Over the past nine months, city management has refused to negotiate in good faith and hasn’t budged from a proposed 1.8% annual wage increase for our members. We are requesting a 5.4% increase to match the current inflation rate, which has skyrocketed from 0.1% in May 2020 to 5.4% now, including a 24% increase in energy costs.
City management also has eliminated pay-for-performance raises for two years in a row, which have cost our members more than $150,000 in lost wage increases. After accepting a 1.5% wage increase last year, we can’t keep losing money working for the city and we shouldn’t be asked to do so when the city is receiving $17.4 million in federal recovery funds. A small portion of those funds could be used for a fair wage increase and premium pay owed to front-line workers who risked their health and safety during the pandemic.
A 5.4% cost-of-living increase for 80 employees would only cost about $270,000, or up to $65,000 less than the City Council’s exorbitant compensation package for themselves.
While city employees are struggling to make ends meet, Mayor Stewart and the City Council are claiming their part-time jobs are fulltime even though 5 out of 7 of them have said they don’t work full-time hours. In a committee report, only two of them said they worked at least 40 hours a week while five others reported part-time hours ranging as low as just 20 hours per week. Nevertheless, they want costly fulltime benefits for their part-time positions.
In 2015, a Council compensation committee of local residents saw no reason to increase the part-time salaries of the mayor or Council except for an annual cost-of-living adjustment. Mayor Stewart, who was then a Councilmember, and Councilmember Terry Seamens both voted for keeping the current salaries and identifying their positions as part-time.
In 2020, a new compensation committee reached some very different conclusions when it recommended that the Council overhaul the Principles of Compensation ordinance. The City Council then voted unanimously to eliminate sections of the ordinance which had stated that “full monetary compensation for the Mayor and Councilmembers is not appropriate” and that their positions “are part-time and should be treated that way.”
The new compensation committee also suggested salaries and benefits packages that far exceed neighboring municipalities with larger populations, claiming that the City Council’s workload “has less to do with population size and more to do with residents’ expectations that Takoma Park always be at the forefront of progressive issues.” There’s nothing progressive about paying exorbitant salaries to a mayor and City Council who refuse to pay fair wages to city workers. There also is an elitist assumption that residents of neighboring cities don’t care about “progressive issues.”
We hope you will support our fight for fair wages in any way that you can. You can find more info and ways you can help at helptakomaparkworkers.org. Please email council@takomaparkmd.gov to share your opinions with the City Council.
You also can sign up to speak at the online City Council meeting this Wednesday, Nov. 10 at 7:30 pm when the Council will vote on its own compensation package. You can speak for up to 3 minutes during public comments, and you don’t have to be a city resident.
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Oct. 27, 2021
The City of Takoma Park isn’t as progressive as it seems or as liberal as it claims to be. Just ask any city employee.
About 80 City of Takoma Park employees are members of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 3399. Most of our members are Black or Hispanic, and we keep the city running every day. We’re so ingrained in the fabric of this community that people often take us for granted. We are the trash collectors and the librarians, the crossing guards and the custodians, the gardeners and the recreation and arts programs organizers, and the police dispatchers who answer 911 calls for help.
We’re asking for the community’s help now to receive fair wages and a true commitment to racial equity from the Takoma Park City Council and city management.
Over the past eight months, city management has refused to negotiate in good faith and hasn’t budged from a proposed 1.8% annual wage increase. We are requesting a 5.4% increase to match the Consumer Price Index which measures inflation. The inflation rate has skyrocketed from 0.1% in May 2020 to 5.4% now, including a 24% increase in energy costs.
City employees received a meager 1.5% wage increase last fiscal year, and we can’t afford to keep losing money when salaries don’t keep pace with the rising cost of living. Some city employees are working two jobs to support their families, and many of us can’t afford to live in Takoma Park with rapidly increasing housing costs. City management also has eliminated pay-for-performance raises for two years in a row.
Our requested general wage increase wouldn't require any tax increases and would only cost about $270,000, or less than 2% of the $17.4 million in American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) federal funding which the city is receiving.
Under ARPA guidelines, front-line employees also are eligible for premium pay for risking their health and safety to keep city services running through the height of the COVID pandemic. Other cities and counties in Maryland are using ARPA funds to recognize the service of their essential employees, including bonuses of up to $5,500 for employees in Washington County and $5,000 in Hagerstown. The Takoma Park City Council has refused to commit any ARPA funds for our front-line workers, but they have allocated almost $1 million for two new managerial positions.
The City Council also wants to double their own salaries and get full-time benefits for their part-time positions through a proposed ordinance that would increase Councilmembers’ salaries by 102% and the mayor’s salary by 108%. Any incumbents who are re-elected next year will profit from their votes now. This largesse for 7 people could cost the city up to $335,000, while our small wage increase for almost 80 employees would cost considerably less.
While many city employees are struggling to get by, city management is paying $250 per hour to a lawyer from an outside firm to fight fair wages in biased negotiations which have reached an impasse. More than $72,000 in city funds have been wasted on legal fees so far, and that amount will spiral higher if arbitration is required because of the city’s refusal to work collaboratively with city employees in a spirit of mutual respect.
We don’t wish to be in an adversarial relationship with city management or the City Council. We have jobs to do and families to support, and we just want to be treated fairly. That shouldn’t be too much to ask for the workers who keep this city running every day.