RFD Union President comments on why they rejected the city's previous contract offers

REDDING, Calif. — The City of Redding and the Redding firefighters union have been in contract negotiations since March of last year. The city said it's made multiple offers that the union rejected.

KRCR’s Tyler Van Dyke asked the President of the Redding Professional Firefighters Michael Ham on Tuesday why they haven't accepted.

"The most recent offer was voted on by membership and voted down almost unanimously—99% of my membership said no. It was extremely regressive, there was just no part of it that we could say yes to," Ham said.

Ham explained that the 26% pay increase isn’t really 26%. "This 26% is just not there when they are asking for or demanding major concessions of our benefits that really eats away at that 26%," he said.

Meanwhile, City Manager Barry Tippin said that those insurance benefits will not be affected, “there's nothing changing in their insurance; it had no effect on whether they would be covered differently,” Tippin said. "Currently, they pay 10% of their monthly premium; every other employee in the City of Redding pays 20% of the monthly premium. We've asked them to pay the same amount as the 750 other city employees."

Here is a breakdown of the current salaries for Redding firefighters.

KRCR asked the union what an acceptable increase for them would look like.

“We were working in good faith with the city to try to come to an agreement and work through some of the things they wanted in addition to that 26% salary increase we felt we were on the backend of almost figuring those items out and then like I said they just didn't want to come back to the table,” Ham said. “Now to say what would a fair offer look like I don't know because what they slid across the table just recently in their last best final offer is not a fair offer."

Mayor Michael Dacquisto said in a press release on Monday that the council has worked hard to balance the budget and develop a proposal that provides a competitive salary and benefits compared to similar cities.

Well according to the comparable city survey put together by the city and RFD.

Redding is number nine out of ten on that list of cities including Chico, Davis, Roseville, Vacaville, and Fairfield to name a few.

"Which is almost at the very bottom and this most recent offer that the city gave us doesn't bring us up very far back when we were talking last year in November we were creeping up there a little bit more but we still had a lot of work to do to get us where we needed or where we felt we needed to be," Ham said.