The local firefighters union and the City and Borough of Juneau reached an agreement on a labor contract last week. That’s after more than a year of negotiations, and nearly a year without an agreement.
The Juneau chapter of the International Association of Fire Fighters, or IAFF, ratified the new contract that takes effect now and lasts two years. The contract comes as the department has struggled with staffing for the past few years.
IAFF Chapter L4303 Union President Logan Balstad said the new contract will make Capital City Fire/Rescue more competitive to recruit and retain staff.
“I think this offer will help keep us in that middle range, rather than dropping back to the bottom, where we were,” he said.
Balstad said wages will increase more than 13% on average across members of the union in Juneau.
The contract also includes yearly adjustments based on the Consumer Price Index in Anchorage to compensate for inflation.
Another win in the contract, Balstad said, is renovation of the CARES sobering center that CCFR runs out of St. Vincent de Paul. He said the center had issues with rodents and insects.
“It’s really a big win for those members there, because the conditions were awful,” he said. “And now they’re going to be in a new space that hopefully is not going to be infested.”
The Juneau chapter of the IAFF has about 57 members, which is most of the department.
Deputy City Manager Robert Barr said union members will get lump sum payments of up to $6,000 to partially compensate for working without a contract for almost a year.
“There’s a retroactive lump sum component in there representative of some of the wage increase that IAFF members would have received had both we CBJ and IAFF been able to successfully come to negotiation on a timely basis,” he said. “But because we weren’t, we included that as well.”
The department has been short nine positions, but it gained some new firefighters last weekend. The first year of a new apprenticeship program yielded several fully trained staff members. Department leadership is in the process of interviewing candidates for its second year of the program. Four apprentices will be chosen this summer.
