NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — The City of Hutchinson went over its agreement for 2024 with the International Association of Fire Fighters on Tuesday.
"Formal negotiations with the IAFF started this year back on February 23," said HR Director Tom Sanders. "After six meetings, we were able to reach a tentative agreement with them on August 2. Most of our negotiations revolved around economic issues. We've experienced a very big acceleration in terms of wage growth in the firefighter world. In this region of Kansas, it's been particularly acute."
The union and the city agreed to work on getting a job description back they haven't had for a while.
"HFD leadership, you might recall from last year, was looking to reimplement the fire engineer job class. We haven't had it since about 2018 or 2019. Chief Beer really felt like that was important for the operations of his group and the safety of the personnel and public safety. We needed to work through the economic effects of adding that new job class in there, which we were successfully able to do."
The additional job description did have an effect on the overall package.
"Movement of the firefighter wage scales up by 4.5% next year, we reduced the top end by 10.4%," Sanders said. "That's a direct result of having that fire engineer job class being added going into the middle. Then, the fire captains had the most dramatic increases from 2023. That will go up 15.9% and the top end will increase 4.5%, bringing the bottom end up quite a bit for the fire captains."
Wage compression is an issue for firefighters, as well.
"We were able to work through with the IAFF a methodology to still reflect performance differences and those kinds of things, but provide appropriate spacing between employees."
The merit pay matrix is up 4.25% for firefighters in 2024, but they also allowed for the formalizing of a policy they hope to aid in retention of new firefighters.
"It costs a lot to outfit a new firefighter with all the PPE," Sanders said. "It's customized gear and all that stuff. We spend at least a couple thousand dollars to do that. One of the things that's been in place at the fire department for, I think two years now, is they have a repayment agreement that if the employee leaves within three years, they pay all or a portion of that cost back to us. That's been happening on a more informal basis. We wanted to put that in the contract, just so we have clear rules of understanding on that."
The hope is that these provisions will allow for the department to continue to attract and retain solid candidates in the coming years.
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