Federation of Connecticut Taxpayer Organizations

Flo Stahl is recognized for being an effective spokesperson for her Taxpayer Group while garnering the necessary information to provide Avon taxpayers with the tools they need to determine how and where their tax dollars are being spent.� Taxpayers in the 169 towns throughout Connecticut, who now pay approximately 85% of their property taxes for personnel related expenses, should be approaching their local elected officials and making a Request for Transparency in Public Sector Union Negotiations, similar to that being made by Flo Stahl as noted within the following�..

By Flo Stahl� Every year a municipality somewhere in Connecticut implores �yes� and a public union somewhere in Connecticut declares �no.�� What they are doing is negotiating ground rules for expiring contracts and addressing the prickly question of whether these negotiations should be open or closed. By �open� we mean allowing passive observation by community members.

It is an intractable stalemate of their own making, since there is no legislation, no understanding, no policy whatsoever that prohibits the public from witnessing these negotiations. All it takes is agreement between the parties.�

At a recent negotiation session in Avon, a union lawyer rejected the town�s request, saying �It would be a circus.� If open negotiations are a circus, then the union would be its ring master. With its overwhelming power, any union could extract the most stringent control in exchange for merely allowing people in the room. Yet his statement went unchallenged because no municipality has ever gone to the mat for open negotiations.� Unlike the occasional binding arbitration cases regarding compensation and work rules, there is not one instance of municipal pushback on the issue of open negotiations. And who could blame them? It would require protracted litigation involving the State Labor Relations Board, a dreaded binding arbitration procedure, and advocacy for an intangible called �transparency.�

What makes the practice of closed negotiations insidious is that it perpetuates a culture of mystery and opaqueness. This is the same culture that is charged with producing the equivalent of a financial hammer because we live or die by these contract decisions for years. When the secretly negotiated contract finally does become public, its opaqueness continues with language that almost always requires knowledge of prior provisions and terms to make any sense of it.

The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the United Auto Workers of America, or the United Farm Workers, to name a few, are all free-market labor organizations not reliant on local property taxes for their lifeblood. These fundamentally different, private sector unions exist in a climate of competition-driven consumer choice, global labor variables, and even world monetary policy. It is not a moral imperative that their negotiations be held in the open. Municipal unions, however, are shielded from all these pressures. They are in a special � one might say � honored, relationship with the public they serve.

So, why the secrecy? Why the license to repeatedly reject open sessions? One partner in this dialog must acknowledge that closed negotiations are indefensible. It raises profound questions about the union-community relationship and, most damaging, it reveals a cynical mindset toward the public it serves. Let the sunshine in. It�s the right thing to do.

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