It has been very busy since our last meeting; I was privileged enough to have the opportunity along with 49 other IAFF brothers and sisters to attend the week long IAFF Communications Academy in Maryland last month. There was a lot of information packed into the week and we had some long days but it was a great opportunity.
Vice President Carriger, Ronnie Hunter - IAFF service rep, IAFF VP Sandy McGhee, Coweta Local President, and myself met in Broken Arrow to discuss the ongoing issue in Coweta. The City Manager working in concert with the Fire Chief and City Attorney, David Weatherford, were claiming that eight members of the fire department were not allowed to be part of the bargaining unit based on their theory that because their salaries were paid out of the “public works trust” and not the general fund that they were not municipal employees. We had an at length discussion on the best path forward and put a game plan together. I believe VP Carriger will report on this in his district report.
I am currently working with Del City and Chickasha through their negotiations process for FY 2017/2018.
I helped Enid in their grievance mediation on May 5th. We were able to settle the grievance and the two parties agreed to negotiate over the issue that led to the grievance.
Over the course of the last month we have met with four different IT companies to have them look at our office and our IT systems. From those meetings they all were given the opportunity to give bids/proposals on upgrading and maintaining our entire IT system. All of them submitted their proposals and recommendations; all four of them said we are in a critical state and at any time could lose all of our data.
I met with some of the policy committee members to start the process of reviewing our policies. This will be a lengthy process due to the fact that it will be almost a complete overhaul.
I have been in correspondence with Rick Beams to try and bring closure to the finalized audit and the findings of the audit along with the findings of the PFFO trustees. I have also been in contact with Brian Foughty to figure out exactly what Rick was assigned to and was not. I have also had conversations with his home Local about what has been happening internally there over the last two years in regards to the work Rick was doing in the Local. I am trying to set up a meeting with Rick, the trustees, Steve Hickman - our legal counsel, and myself to try and come up with some type of resolution on this issue.
We have a meeting scheduled on June 22nd with Senator Dahm to discuss our issues. Legislative Director Chalk Norton is also working to set up a meeting with the Governor our her associates to try and figure out why she vetoed the PERB bill and try to get an action plan put together to address that issue.
We were finally able to get the new layout for our website up and running, I think it looks great and we are working to get all of the information updated and keep it updated. During the IAFF Communications Academy I was able to start up a new PFFO Facebook profile as well as a closed group strictly for our members. Hopefully we will be able to use the closed group to get our information out to our members.
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