Good Evening President Ianson, Members of the Board. I am Tim Bogner, a member of the Menlo Park Firefighters’ Association and an Engineer employed by the Menlo Park Fire Protection District. I am here tonight to exercise my First Amendment right to tell you why I think the Association and the District have not been able to reach agreement on a new labor contract. Your October 28th letter states that the District has been carefully and lawfully adhering to the contract negotiation process in conformance with State law. If this is so, why did the Public Employment Relations Board issue a complaint against the District on February 24, 2010, alleging that it is the District, not the Association, that has violated its duty to meet and confer in good faith? Why is the District making offers in contract negotiations with the Association that not only fail to bring our benefits up to the average paid by other public agencies which the District agreed are comparable to the Menlo Park Fire District but also fail to provide firefighters with any reimbursement for the health care benefit costs they have had to pay themselves for the past five and one-half years due to the fact that the District’s health care benefit contribution has remained at the current level of 0 per month since July 1, 2005? The district has had not problem increasing the administrations health care contribution to 00.00 since 2008. Why should the Association come back to the bargaining table and meet …
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Fire Board, I am Kevin Brandon, a firefighter medic in my 11th year here. I take an enormous amount of pride being a Menlo Park Fireman and I truly love this job and this department. Bearing witness to the destructive relationship between the administration (our leadership) and the firefighters would not hurt so much if it was not for this pride and love. This degradation may have begun with the failed negotiation process but in my eyes goes way beyond an absent raise. The true degradation has evolved from a lack of trust, faith, and respect. It is very difficult to listen to a 30 year veteran of this deptartment reflect on his career and say he has never seen moral this low and has never felt this disheartened. In my struggle for answers or insight I looked online for some information on labor negotiations and came across a great article by Steven Cohen from the Ivey Business Journal. I am going to read and paraphrase what I feel are key points. Taking a hard line may be fine – but only in the short term, and only if you really believe that your counterpart is your adversary. But negotiation is often a series of episodes, which means that considering your counterpart as a partner or a collaborator is the foundation of trusting and fruitful- and ongoing – negotiation. How the game is played matters more than who wins. Why negotiate? If everyone – an individual or a company – had everything they wanted, there would be no particular reason to negotiate, bargain, or …
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Donning ppe

The battle begins.