Fairbanks Daily News-Miner

The city of Fairbanks has won another legal challenge linked to controversial budget cuts made four years ago. The win is the city’s seventh straight victory in the issue.

The decision Thursday from Superior Court Judge Randy Olsen denied a firefighter union’s appeal of a previous decision from a state labor agency. The agency in 2005 upheld the Fairbanks City Council’s decision of late 2003 to leave unfunded sections of the union’s contract covering health care and certain benefits for unionized workers.

The union — the Fairbanks Fire Fighters Association — has the option of appealing again to the Alaska Supreme Court, an option that union president Dominic Lozano said it will seriously consider. Lozano acknowledged that laws in Alaska allow municipal bodies, such as city councils, to leave terms of labor agreements unfunded during annual budget reviews.

“We just believe the city went further than the intent of the (law) allows,” he said.

Olsen wrote that a policy-making body, such as the City Council, has the ability to fund or leave unfunded certain terms of a contract that had been previously agreed to by its government’s administration. Under state law, an executive branch of government in Alaska, he wrote, cannot “commit” future policy-making bodies to pay what it had negotiated in previous years.

“Each year, monetary terms (of a contract) are subject to independent legislative approval,” he wrote.

The decision followed six similar rulings involving challenges from other major unions covering police officers and most other public workers in the city.

It also comes as the city and the firefighters union continue their working relationship despite the absence of a current contract. Firefighters are working under the terms of their old contract, which expired two years ago.

The union and the city’s former mayor had failed to agree to a new contract, leaving firefighters as the only union of four at the city without an updated labor agreement.

New Mayor Terry Strle pledged, while campaigning for office, to “give it one last try” with the firefighters before the two parties head to binding arbitration.

“We are talking,” she said. “Certainly we want to get this resolved.”

Lozano said Thursday that those negotiations have continued with the understanding that legal issues surrounding the union’s most recent contract could remain unanswered for a while.

“I don’t think the decision affects where negotiations will go,” he said of Olsen’s ruling.

*Contact staff writer Chris Eshleman at 459-7582. *