{"id":532279,"date":"2010-04-17T15:39:44","date_gmt":"2010-04-17T19:39:44","guid":{"rendered":"tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d8341c60fd53ef0133ecc1939b970b"},"modified":"2010-04-17T15:39:44","modified_gmt":"2010-04-17T19:39:44","slug":"daley-brushes-off-police-union-criticism-on-new-contract","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/532279","title":{"rendered":"Daley brushes off police union criticism on new contract"},"content":{"rendered":"

Posted by John Byrne<\/em> at 2:35 p.m.
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Mayor Richard Daley today brushed off attempts by police union leaders to blame his<\/a> administration for officers not getting better raises in a new five-year contract.<\/p>\n

And the mayor also said the city can handle the $160 million in back pay now owed to police under terms of the deal.<\/p>\n

"Better than 16 percent or twenty," Daley said of the 10 percent raise over five years that the city owes rank-and-file officers following an arbitrator’s decision Friday. The mayor insists police could have had a 16 percent raise, but Fraternal Order of Police officials didn’t accept the offer he made in 2008. An independent arbitrator awarded the lower amount.
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<\/br>"We’re going to bond it out, and we knew we had to do that, and that’s what we’ll do," Daley said, promising the cash-strapped city is ready to find the money to pay police officers.
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<\/br>FOP President Mark Donahue labeled Daley’s perspective "a lie." Donahue said at a Friday news conference that the city pulled the 16 percent proposal off the table before the two sides had a chance to discuss it during the protracted negotiations that began in 2007. The city yanked the offer in March 2009 after it had been on the table for more than a year.
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<\/br>It’s no surprise the union is trying to make him the scapegoat, Daley said.
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<\/br>"No kidding," Daley said while speaking to reporters at a neighborhood clean-up event in the East Chatham neighborhood. "They’re gonna say ‘Mayor Daley’s a bad guy,’ this and that."
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<\/br>Donahue also said he was "perplexed" by a contract provision for random alcohol testing of on-duty officers, saying the city had failed to prove there is a problem with officers drinking on the job. But the mayor said it’s important to hold officers accountable for their actions on duty.
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<\/br>"If a police officer’s driving a car and runs into that pillar there that says ‘Keep Right,’ don’t you think we should legally test for alcohol?" he asked.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Posted by John Byrne at 2:35 p.m. Mayor Richard Daley today brushed off attempts by police union leaders to blame his administration for officers not getting better raises in a new five-year contract. And the mayor also said the city can handle the $160 million in back pay now owed to police under terms of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3992,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-532279","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/532279","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3992"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=532279"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/532279\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=532279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=532279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=532279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}