By Dan Hust
MONTICELLO — January 7, 2011 — Turns out the Sullivan County Sheriff’s Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association (PBA) is not part of the new SC Public Employees and Taxpayers’ Alliance.
PBA President and Sheriff’s Detective Ed Simon said Wednesday the PBA was merely observing at Monday’s gathering of unions at the Blue Horizon Diner in Monticello.
It was not meant, he said, as an endorsement of the new alliance’s plans, of which the PBA is neither a member nor participant.
“We have our [own] priorities,” Simon explained. “Our needs differ, so our course of action is going to be different.”
In a letter to County Manager David Fanslau on Tuesday, Simon wrote that the PBA was on a “fact-finding mission” and is not participating in filing a grievance about the wage/longevity bonus freezes nor conducting an audit of county finances.
“As you know,” he wrote, “since the PBA has yet to settle its contract with the county, it has no standing at this time with any grievance involving wage freezes.”
The 42 Sheriff’s deputies the PBA represents have been working without a contract for four years.
“We’re heading to binding arbitration,” Simon told the Democrat.
The Civil Service Employees Association (CSEA) is pursuing its own grievance against the county over the wage/bonus freezes, said spokeswoman Jessica Ladlee.
“This is something we’re doing independently,” she verified on Wednesday, adding that the union alliance “is not something we’re part of at this time.”
CSEA represents 107 employees at the county jail.
Thus the new alliance includes three, not four, unions: Teamsters Local 445 (representing 650 county workers), Laborers Local 17 (128) and the New York State Nurses Association (62) – about three-quarters of the county’s workforce.