The union representing the Penticton Community Centre pool workers turned down an agreement in August that would have guaranteed all their jobs back with the same salaries and seniority they had before the facility shut down for renovations in March, according to the city’s Mayor Dan Ashton and CAO Annette Antoniak. Ashton said in exchange for the new contract, the only concessions he would have asked for in return were that new employees not start at the same pay level as those who have been working at the pool for years, sometimes decades, and that those new employees would top out at a lower salary. However, CUPE turned down the offer because, the union said, it could not make such concessions outside of official bargaining negotiations — a process for which, as of Monday, a firm set of dates has still not been established. Ashton said the deal would have created a pay scale similar to those accepted by unions in the private sector where employees receive scheduled pay increases based on their hours of work. “I have had the discussion with (pool workers) where I have said that I don’t think it is fair that you have been a lifeguard for (several) years and someone else starts tomorrow and you start at the same rate,” said Ashton. “We have got to start phasing people in (with) a lower start and a lower cap, but everybody that is working is grandfathered and protected all the way down.” Antoniak, who was not with the city at the time, said before making the offer, her predecessor, Dennis Back, laid out the city’s financial difficulties including declining revenues and a growing deficit — a financial hole she says now currently sits somewhere between $1.7 and $2.1 million. As a result of still not having reached a deal with CUPE, Antoniak said the city is now officially seeking tender proposals to have a private company operate the community centre and its pool — an idea that was delivered to council in March as part of the city’s core services review, but was not made public until last month. “We would like all of the staff back, but having said that we also have to do our due diligence,” said Antoniak. “We have to protect our interests, and so that is why we are going to go out and seek expressions of interests and requests for qualifications on the running of the community centre.”
CUPE local president Patti Finch stressed that the union did not reject the contents of the offer. “What they brought to us ... changes articles and wage adjustments in the collective agreement, but the collective agreement had already expired last December, therefore we could not go in and make changes to it as we could have if it was still currently in effect,” explained Finch. “The community centre is only part of the membership that I represent that is covered by that collective agreement. That collective agreement covers all the members of CUPE in the City of Penticton. So, we can’t make an agreement that deals with only part of it.” Instead, Finch said some city workers formed a committee that came up with $685,000 in “cost sharing and revenue generating ideas that would save the city money.” The union offered the list of cost-saving ideas to the city in exchange for assurances that the community centre would remain public.
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