Six months after moving to Southern California from suburban Kansas City, easygoing John Nachbar is staring eye-to-eye with his first teeth-clenching test as the City Manager of Culver City.
If City Hall is not gasping for fiscal air, this is as close as it wants to be, and that makes his assignment both tougher and clearer.
It is negotiation season for three of the six City Hall unions. While normally that would be stressful, an added fillip this time is a foreign notion to every union leader on the planet:
Each group will need to hand back some hard-fought fiscal gains.
Unsurprisingly, not one volunteer is in sight.
The City Manager knows how he will be spending his spring season. Contract talks normally take “at least several months,” he said, and this year’s bargaining will be the thorniest that even senior union leaders ever have faced.
Mr. Nachbar diplomatically characterized the responses of the first three unions as “varying levels of resistance.”
“This is going to be very challenging,” said a man with 30 years of background.
Is the City Manager confident he can convince all six labor groups to surrender a portion of previously won packages?
“No, I am not confident of that,” Mr. Nachbar said in his standard measured, almost drawling, tone.
However, every union will have to give back
“I am not confident of what their ultimate response will be,” Mr. Nachbar said.
“The city has a responsibility to bargain in good faith,” he added while knowing that his side will prevail because give-backs, between now and the end of the calendar year, will be demanded, and won, from all six.
“Ultimately the employer has a significant amount of leverage. I hate to be any more specific than that.”
