City Beautiful Cops Get Ugly
Police Union Targets Mayor, Demands End to Contract Dispute

“Pull Quote: “It’s so demeaning, so cheap, so low, just gutter level, the Bronx street fighting, with brass knuckles and the whole nine yards.”

Coral Gables Police officers picket in front of La Dorada restaurant, Monday evening. Photo by Cynthia Archbold.

By Cynthia Archbold

Supporters of Coral Gables’ mayor denounced a picket organized by the city’s police union, in front of a re-election fundraising campaign party, held Monday evening.

“It was disgusting. It was intimidating,” says Andy Murai, describing what it was like to break through a circle of 50 to 60 angry Coral Gables Police officers, all members of the city chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police, marching, yelling and screaming at him and other supporters of Mayor Don Slesnick throughout his campaign party at La Dorada restaurant at 177 Giralda Ave.

Police union members chanted “We want a contract! We want a contract!” and other slogans targeting Slesnick supporters.

Murai, a business owner and member of the city’s code enforcement board, says, “As I went out they [the officers] screamed at me — ‘Don’t support the mayor.’”

“Oh yes, police were screaming and yelling and I’m sure some people felt intimidated,” Coral Gables FOP President Eugene Gibbons says.

“I can tell you I don’t think this is doing them any good,” Murai says. “What concerns me also is that people who are not aware that there was a fundraiser could have interpreted it that this was a labor dispute with the restaurant. And the poor restaurant owners could be damaged. If you were walking by the restaurant you certainly wouldn’t have [gone in] last night. They lost businesses. Nobody in their right mind would go there.”

The picketing lasted for an hour and a half, Murai says. It was the scariest disruption of the peace ever in the City Beautiful, claims mayoral supporter Enrique Lopez.

“It was despicable,” says Lopez, an engineer who serves on the city’s utilities task force. “They were taunting us, screaming ‘Don’t sign the check! Don’t sign the check!’ I’ve never seen anything of this nature. 

“The women at the party said they felt threatened and intimidated,” Lopez adds as demonstrating police officers, some blowing into whistles and other noise-makers, yelled and brushed up against those entering the restaurant.

“They were drowning out the mayor. You could hear the screaming, the whistles. It was malicious. The taunting of people coming in. It’s hurting the business and the people who live there,” Lopez says. “It reminded me of what I witnessed in Cuba at age 7, when Fidel was in power and the communists drowned everyone out and made verbal attacks.”

Murai and Lopez both reported the incident to City Manager David Brown and Lopez also wrote a letter to Police Chief Michael Hammerschmidt.

“How did they get a permit to do this?” asks Murai. “There were no barricades, there was no protection from the demonstrators.”

“We had an officer on duty to make sure things were under control,” Hammerschmidt says.

“Well it wasn’t,” counters Mayor Don Slesnick. “It was totally inappropriate. People were made to feel physically threatened. It was an assault.”

He says police got right in people’s faces, unlike a similar protest staged by city of Miami Police at the grand opening of the Carnival Center for the Performing Arts, where police were contained in a corner and separated from the crowd with barricades.

But his campaign supporters, Slesnick says, are not being deterred from voting for him or writing checks. Monday night’s event brought his campaign war chest to more than $100,000, well over his original goal of $70,000.

Gibbons says he doesn’t care how people perceive the protest. “We have nothing to lose.” The police union has been without a contract for two years and is at an impasse in negotiations with the city, he says.

“They gave us nothing,” Gibbons says.

But city negotiators claim they offered police a 3 percent pay increase in the latest contract talks in January, when police walked away from the table, because the city also asked police to contribute 5 percent of their salaries to the pension fund, as do the Coral Gables firefighters and other municipal employee union members.

In a nutshell, Gibbons says what police union members want is to retire with a pension that pays them 87.5 percent rather than 75 percent of their highest wages three years of working.

The union’s latest offer involved police offering to kick in 7 percent of their salaries toward the pension fund in exchange for retiring with 87.5 percent of their salaries. He says it’s a better deal for the city.

The city disagrees, and believes “it would fracture the employee pension plan,” says Finance Director Don Nelson.

There’s no shortage of police from other cities eager to work in Coral Gables, says Officer Frank Johnson, media spokesperson for the police department. “We’ve been hiring officers like crazy.” The department is now fully staffed with 184 officers.

Currently, Coral Gables Police salaries range from $42,842 - $68,124 annually. It takes seven years for an officer to make it to the maximum salary, which doesn’t include overtime. Overtime exponentially raises police wages, Nelson says.

In addition, every police officer has a take-home car and health benefits.

After 25 years police officers are eligible to retire with 75 percent of their highest salary plus overtime over a three year period. Nelson says this means some officers are making $100,000 a year after they retire, and some of them are retiring at the age of 45. “Worst-case scenario for an officer who never worked overtime, he retires at about $52,000 a year for the rest of his life,” says Nelson.

Slesnick supporter Lopez says he knows former Miami police officers who have joined the Coral Gables force and say, “Hell, this is paradise.’”

The latest crime statistics released Monday, show there have been no murders in Coral Gables in two years. Four incidents of rape were reported last year. Violent crime is down 21 percent compared to last year, the statistics say.

Gibbons has gone beyond public demonstrations to attempt to derail Mayor Don Slesnick’s campaign. He has organized a phone bank that has placed between 10,000 and 20,000 calls to Coral Gables registered voters to announce a “crisis in the city.” The message, recorded by Gibbons himself, warns voters not to vote for Slesnick.

“They better strap on their helmets. We’re here to play,” says Gibbons

“He’s up for election, and he’s the only one who has opponents,” Gibbons says, explaining why he’s going after Slesnick, noting that commissioners Bill Kerdyk and Chip Withers are running unopposed.

“We’re taxpayers too,” Gibbons says. “We own a building in the city and we pay taxes. The 33,000 taxpayers have a right to know the direction the city is taking.”

Prior to attacking the mayor, the FOP targeted City Manager David Brown because of failed contract negotiations, and because of Brown’s insistence that police contribute 5 percent of their salaries to the pension fund. Police demanded a refund for the amount deducted from their paychecks, and the city later returned the money to police.

But the state’s Public Employees Relation Commission ruled that Brown had committed an unfair labor practice in warning police that the city commission might not give them pay raises for three years if they insisted on being refunded.

“It’s so demeaning, so cheap so low, just gutter level, the Bronx street fighting, with brass knuckles and the whole nine yards,” Lopez says of the FOP’s campaign against the city manager.

Slesnick says Coral Gables has never had an FOP president with Gibbons’ animosity. “It’s something we haven’t experienced before,” Slesnick says. “He decided to take on the mayor and scare the other commissioners.”

Meanwhile the city manager says police have the right to demonstrate, but not to impede or obstruct the public in the course of protesting. Brown says the city will make sure that police don’t behave so aggressively again when they demonstrate at future campaign functions.

But Gibbons promises there is more to come. “We just don’t care,” he says.

Meanwhile, the FOP president is choosing which of Slesnick’s opponents in the mayor’s race to back with the union’s war chest. So far Richard Namon is the only one who has filed the paperwork and is officially running, but former Mayor George Corrigan promises to file his paperwork on Feb. 19. Commissioner Ralph Cabrera, meanwhile, has decided not to run for the mayor’s seat.

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