By RUSS OLIVO and JOSEPH B. NADEAU

WOONSOCKET — Two of the city’s four major labor unions have now formally ratified five-month contracts that include major rollbacks in benefits for Mayor Susan D. Menard’s plan to close a gaping $3.6 million budget deficit.

Local 670 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees voted overwhelmingly in favor of the latest contract proposal during a ratification session in Harris Hall Thursday night. The union represents about 112 secretaries, clerks, laborers and other municipal workers, many of them at City Hall.
Ron Servizi, the union president, said the pact calls for concessions on sick leave reimbursement and health care benefits. Union members will be required to kick in up to five percent of their gross pay as a share of their annual health insurance premiums. Most thought the latter provision was more equitable than a previous proposal seeking a flat rate of 15 percent of the premium, which would have hit workers at the low end of the pay spectrum quite hard.
Members filling Harris Hall for the closed-door meeting Thursday evening heard Sen. John Tassoni, a local representative for the union, present details of a five-month contract settlement that will save the city a total of $163,700 through furlough days, leaving certain posts unfilled, forfeiting some sick leave reimbursements and adding medical care co-payments of 3 percent of base pay for a single person coverage and 5 percent for family coverage.
The union members began voting on the proposal after an hour of discussion. Tassoni announced the tally, 29 members opposed and 49 in favor, as the meeting broke up.
“We had a lot of questions and concerns about moving forward,” Tassoni said. Some of the members questioned what would happen when the five-month agreement runs out and Tassoni said he will be sending a letter to the city requesting the start of a new round of negotiations for the future upon final approval of the agreement.
The City Council will consider approval of the settlement Monday night and the sides are due back in court before Associate Superior Court Judge Mark A. Pfeiffer to update him on the status of the agreement on Tuesday.
While creating savings to help the city fix its expected deficit, Tassoni said he also told the union members the plan could become “null and void,” if the General Assembly does not enact the state revenue cuts Gov. Donald Carcieri has proposed.
On Thursday morning, members of Local 3851 of the Professional and Technical Employees union, PROTECH, also voted overwhelmingly in favor of a five-month contract proposal, said Housing Inspector Armand E. Binette, president of the local. The union represents 29 mid-level managers and other high-skill workers at City Hall.
Binette said the contract calls on members to begin contributions to health care premiums that are “close to” the 15 percent share the administration was seeking earlier. It also calls for a number of unpaid furlough days between now and the end of the fiscal year, on June 30, said Binette.
“We’re making the best of a bad situation,” he said. “Members are not happy, but given the conditions of how bad things are they understand that we have to make some concessions.”
As it stands, members of Local 670 and Local 3851 were being hit by a “triple play” to help the city out of its budget crisis, Tassoni said.
Most of the union members live in the city in addition to working for it, he said.
“They are getting hit by the furlough day, the increased co-payment, and the fee for garbage collection approved by the City Council last week,” he said.
Tassoni attributed the settlement as resulting “from a good faith effort on the part of both locals to help the city in this financial mess.”
As they came out of the meeting, several of the Local 670 members said they thought the offer would be approved given the current state of the economy.
As he left the meeting, Gerry Fontaine, a member of the Parks and Recreation Department, said the employees had “no choice” in approving the agreement.
“I don’t want a 5-percent pay cut every year and this is better on the co-payment,” he said.
Mark Ricard, a dispatcher for the police department, said there had been concern among the employees about what would happen when the five-month period covered by the agreement ends but he still believed it would pass based on what he heard other people saying.
“I heard it is supposed to revert back to the old agreement that we were working under when it expires,” he said.
Another member of the union, a woman also working as a clerk, said she viewed the agreement as being “500 percent better” than the changes the employees had been facing. “There’s no pay cut and the co-payment is 3 percent for a single and 5 percent for a family,” she said.
While the members of Local 670 and Local 3851 accepted the settlement offer, the city has still been unable to come to terms with members of Local 404 of the International Brotherhood of Police Officers and Local 732 of the International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF).
Detective Sgt. John Scully, president of the police union, said his members unanimously rejected the mayor’s contract proposal in a ratification vote at headquarters Wednesday afternoon. He said a provision calling for the elimination of sick leave buybacks was an issue because the membership felt it would have unfairly affected some 28 of the Woonsocket Police Department’s most senior officers. The benefit is a basically a cash payment for officers who can no longer accrue sick time because they’ve already banked the maximum.
But Scully said he was hopeful that negotiations with the administration would continue. Scully said the union, which has about 90 members, plans to resurrect some earlier proposals which the administration had previously seemed to favor.
All three of the above unions voted on tentative contract proposals after Judge Pfeiffer had instructed the parties to resume collective bargaining. The unions had first approached Pfeiffer last week after the City Council approved a plan, crafted by Menard, to cut salaries 5 percent across the board and require workers to begin paying 15 percent of the cost of their annual health insurance premiums.
The unions had planned to seek an injunction to block the cuts, but Pfeiffer merely instructed the parties to continue their efforts to hammer out mutually agreeable rollbacks at the bargaining table.
Two days’ worth of the disputed cuts will actually show up in paychecks today, but officials say workers will be made whole in paychecks issued next week.
The only municipal union that was unable to come to terms with the administration after meeting with Pfeiffer was the 122-member IAFF.
However, when the union returned to court on Wednesday to renew its bid for an injunction, Pfeiffer again instructed the parties to resume negotiations.
As of press time, it was unclear whether any new bargaining sessions had been scheduled. IBPO officials said no new session was planned, though they were optimistic of meeting with the administration soon. Officials from the IAFF couldn’t be reached.
But the IAFF’s lawyer, Edward C. Roy Jr., said Pfeiffer has asked the legal representatives of all four unions to return to court on Tuesday to review the progress of talks.
The administration has been pressing the unions for concessions for weeks as Menard scrambles to deal with the loss of some $3.6 million in state aid she expects will be eliminated from this year’s budget. The cut represents a loss of general revenue sharing to cities and towns that Gov. Donald Carcieri has erased from the state budget in order to close a projected deficit of approximately $357 million.
The cost-cutting mantra of the Menard administration has been that the city must obtain significant concessions in wages and benefits from the unions or, alternatively, make massive layoffs in the police and fire departments. Unless it achieves the necessary savings, Menard says the city faces possible bankruptcy and is on track to run out of cash to pay bills and payroll by mid-March.