Page 5 - FOP August 2019 Magazine

CHICAGO LODGE 7
Official Magazine
President’s Report
A good bet on pension funding and members’ rights
FRATERNAL ORDER OF POLICE CHICAGO LODGE #7
EXECUTIVE BOARD
KEVIN GRAHAM
President
PATRICK J. MURRAY
First Vice President
Martin Preib
Second Vice President
Jay R. Ryan
Third Vice President
Greg Bella
Recording Secretary
Michael P. Garza
Financial Secretary
John Capparelli
Treasurer
Dean C. Angelo, Sr.
Immediate Past President
Sergeants-at-Arms
William Burns James Jakstavich Michael Mette
Trustees
Harold Brown Andrew Cantore Mark Donahue William Dougherty Pat Duckhorn Sergio Escobedo Fernando Flores Joseph Gentile Danny Gorman Ken Hauser Rick King Frank Quinn Carlos Salazar Ron Shogren Mark Tamlo Daniel Trevino Michael Underwood
Field Representatives
Robert Bartlett Rich Aguilar
KEVIN GRAHAM
The women and men who spend 20, 30 and even 40 years protecting the city represent a group of Chicago Lodge 7 members for whom we are working to up the ante so they don’t have to gamble on their futures.
These are our retired members. The City has a responsibility to retired police officers – and the growing group that will be retiring during the next five years. We’re going to make sure the City lives up to that responsibility.
We’ve done that by working bills in the State Legislature to increase pension funding. We know the pension is not as well funded as it needs to be, and we need to make sure there is funding for everybody, funding you can rely on to provide the pension you signed up for and served 20, 30 and even 40 years for.
The FOP, for example, was one of the initial proponents of the casino bill, which we believed would have produced pension funding that retired members could count on. The bill that eventually was signed in June authorized Chicago to have a casino with 4,000 gaming positions.
But it does not allow the City to hold the gaming license, which would have generated more revenue — money that would have gone to supporting police and fire pensions. Our proposal for that same directive included having proceeds from sports betting go into our pension fund. But that was not adopted.
The bill directs the City to hire a gaming company to run the positions, which concerns us. This will be part of our next conversation with the mayor. We need to get the gaming up and run- ning as soon as possible and increase pension funding.
We did have a meeting with the mayor just before the Fourth of July, and it was a good meeting. Not a discouraging or insulting word was heard. We worked on the things we agreed on. We will work on the things we disagree about at the next meeting.
Regarding the mayor, I believe she owes FOP First Vice President Pat Murray an apology for the comments she made during the city council meeting on July 24. If somebody from the FOP had been caught on camera making a similar comment, the city would be up in arms. We are not asking her for anything that isn’t proper and due.
At the meeting in July, we agreed on the need for resources to promote mental healthcare for Chicago Police Officers. We agreed that it’s important to get a contract done. We talked about funding for the Department and the impact of having funding toward our pensions.
I am doing my best to create a relationship with the mayor. We need a contract, and she needs crime reduced. The reality is that we have to curtail shootings. We have to reach common ground based on public safety being the No. 1 priority to protect the citizens of Chicago and our mem- bers who are putting their lives on the line every day and every night. It will be difficult dealing with this mayor, now that she has exhibited that her ego is too big for her to appropriately apolo- gize for a stupid comment she made about the FOP. We will need to work through that as well for the sake of the membership, but it will never be forgotten.
For our active members, we do have some good intel. The City has realized that it must bargain with us over the effects of any policy change involving disciplining officers. Judge Robert Dow has made it very clear that the consent decree cannot trump labor law or our contract.
This is an ongoing crusade for us. Other cities have lost rights for officers. We have not. We’re not going to acquiesce to the attorney general or the City wanting to take away rights that officers and the FOP have fought hard to secure. And what the City and the attorney general fail to realize is that we made other sacrifices to have those protections in our contract. So if you try and take those away, you need to compensate us significantly for losing valuable protections.
This is the one of the reasons why our contract negotiations are taking so long. I realize our members want the contract done yesterday. The cost of living continues to go up, and we haven’t had a raise in more than two years. I can assure you we are working our way through that.
CHICAGO LODGE 7 ■ AUGUST 2019 5