Razzle Dazzle As '372' Vote Goes, So Goes DC 37

Razzle Dazzle
As '372' Vote Goes, So Goes DC 37


On June 11, District Council 37 will host an election vote for its largest local that could go a long way toward determining whether the union remains in the state of suspended animation where it's dwelt for the past six years.

Veronica Montgomery-Costa, the president of Department of Education Workers Local 372 whose future is riding on that vote, is betting on continued apathy to secure her fourth term. After first campaigning for office in 1999 on a pledge to get members more involved in the local, she has confined each election since then to DC 37's headquarters, making it difficult for those who are dispersed to schools throughout the five boroughs to cast ballots.

The union has nearly 25,000 members, but few of them have been willing or able to make the trip. Turnout in its last two elections has averaged a bit more than 500 members, and Ms. Montgomery-Costa has won her second and third terms on the votes of less than two percent of those she represents.

An Opponent of Voter Convenience

She has rebuffed calls to hold a mail ballot, claiming that the cost of more than $60,000 would be prohibitive, or to increase the number of polling places so that her members could at least stay within their own boroughs and vote. Her one concession to the negative publicity she has received has been to expand voting hours - previously from 4 to 8 p.m. - to a noon to 9 p.m. schedule, although for those who don't finish work until the end of the school day, this effectively amounts to just a one-hour extension of the period in which they can cast ballots.

THE FACE OF DC 37's DISCONTENT: Veronica Montgomery-Costa has maintained control of District Council 37's largest local without an uprising over a $76,000 pay hike her board gave her six years ago in large part by discouraging member participation in Local 372 elections and ruling with an autocratic style.

This travesty of an election process is actually an improvement over how things operate in DC 37, where Ms. Montgomery-Costa also serves as president. There, the rank and file doesn't even have a limited time-frame at a single location to vote for its leaders; instead delegates cast weighted ballots for DC 37's top officers. And because of the size of Ms. Montgomery-Costa's local, and her tight grip on her delegates, she exerts considerable power; her support, combined with the president of Local 1549, which has the second-largest contingent in the 124,000-member DC 37, produces virtual veto power over whoever leads the city's second-largest municipal employees union.

DC 37's slip from being the biggest city union - after more than 40 years of having that distinction - occurred last year when the United Federation of Teachers gained the right to represent 28,000 city-based home day-care workers. That is but one symptom of the union's diminishing clout during the six-plus years that Lillian Roberts has been DC 37's executive director.

Among the others are the city's refusal until now to give the union contract terms that are in the neighborhood of those reached last July with the Sergeants Benevolent Association that - in the rapidly shifting world of municipal bargaining - serve as the pattern for the current negotiating round.

There is also the carryover of an unfulfilled piece of the DC 37 contract that expired in March and was actually negotiated two years ago: a relaxing of residency rules for union members that was to put them on the same footing as uniformed workers. Despite the Bloomberg administration's assent to this provision, the legislation that would make it real remains stalled at the City Council.

Early-Retirement Bill a 'Voodoo' Victim

That is not the only bill of prime concern to the union that has withered on the vine. The New York Times story last month that put a hold on all union pension bills during the current session of the Legislature after the actuary who did the cost estimate described his figures as "one step above voodoo" concerned a bill that would have allowed DC 37 members who passed on the chance to opt for early retirement 13 years ago to retroactively sign on.

Of particular urgency to 1,400 of DC 37's members are bills being buffeted about in Albany that provide the potential salvation of the Off-Track Betting Corporation before Mayor Bloomberg makes good on his threat to shut it down next week. It's widely believed the rescue will arrive before the last jump, but two OTB branches have already been closed and employees who have since received layoff notices are agonizing over the possibility that the worst will actually materialize.

These are all signs of a union that is either incapable of muscling up to assert its strength in behalf of the rank and file or is too afraid of the consequences of getting tough with those who run the city and Albany to use its power. Anyone who believes the shroud of gloom and doom hanging over DC 37 is merely a product of bad luck need only gaze at what has happened in the Police Department to divest themselves of that notion.

Nearly four years ago, in a case that goes back nearly two decades, an arbitrator ruled that Police Commissioners had violated the contract covering DC 37 clerical workers by assigning uniformed cops to duties that were supposed to be performed by Police Administrative Aides.

The arbitrator, Maurice Benewitz, ordered the parties "to devise an efficient and rapid procedure for identifying officers assigned to the clerical-administrative duties," then replace them with civilians.

3,500 Possibilities But No Gain

The lawyer who had brought the case for DC 37 estimated at that time in September 2004 that there were 3,500 NYPD jobs that could be civilianized. But the NYPD was slow to comply with the ruling, and Mayor Bloomberg at one point the following year was reported by DC 37's newspaper to have likened getting the department to move on the issue to "pulling teeth."

Plans were eventually announced by Police Commissioner Ray Kelly to civilianize 500 jobs. But a DC 37 consultant in 2007 stated in a memo that when she pointed out to one of her superiors how slowly the NYPD was moving on the issue, she was told to "back off."

A reasonable interpretation of that instruction was that Ms. Roberts had concluded that whatever fondness the Mayor had for her ran a weak second to his deference to Commissioner Kelly's prerogatives, and she was not willing to risk antagonizing Mr. Bloomberg by going to court to force compliance with the arbitrator's ruling.

Three months ago, Mr. Kelly testified before the City Council that he was cutting his budget in part by freezing civilian hiring, leaving positions that were vacated to be filled whenever necessary by uniformed officers. This seemed strange, given that it meant pulling cops off the street at a time when the NYPD had a shortage of uniformed personnel. But the strangest element was that the reduction in civilian employees through attrition - 243 jobs in the current fiscal year, 374 in the one that begins next month - if carried out would mean that the NYPD actually had reduced its civilian workforce since the ruling directing it to significantly increase it.

Ms. Roberts protested the cuts at the time that they were announced. That didn't amount to much, but it was more than she did when Assembly Speaker Shelly Silver announced last month that he was derailing the early-retirement bill following the uproar over actuary Jonathan Schwartz's indiscreet remarks about his own cost estimates.

Preoccupied Writing Memoirs?

There are those who say that Ms. Roberts's disengagement from recent pressing issues for DC 37 - declining even to issue statements that go beyond "no comment" - are a product of her being otherwise engaged. She is said to be working on her memoirs with the help of DC 37's communications director, Zita Allen.

That she can get away with this is attributable to the Byzantine and anti-democratic method that DC 37 has for choosing its leaders, a process unlike that used by virtually any other city union. The delegate structure vests the power to elect top officers with a bit more than 300 people, but the control that local presidents like Ms. Montgomery-Costa exert means that in reality just a few key officials are needed to maintain Ms. Roberts's power. The delegates in turn can be brought into line with perks like committee assignments worth as little as $9,000 a year.

Reciprocity a Corruption Recipe

The political reciprocity involved was considered a leading factor in the massive corruption scandal that engulfed DC 37 in the late 1990s, with the biggest rip-offs engineered by the then-heads of the two largest locals, Charlie Hughes of Local 372 and Al Diop of Local 1549. After indictments by the Manhattan District Attorney's Office for the stealing of millions of dollars through embezzlement and kickbacks and the fixing of elections for both union officers and a 1995 DC 37 wage contract turned the scandal into a national embarrassment, the parent union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, stepped in.

It imposed financial controls and put an end to much of the election chicanery, but stopped short of the real reforms that might have revitalized DC 37, most notably the direct election of the union's top officers by its rank and file. There were advantages to preserving the electoral status quo for AFSCME President Gerry McEntee, since it perpetuated a system in which he needed to strike an alliance only with DC 37's two representatives on his own board to shore up his standing against political challengers.

Mr. McEntee and Ms. Roberts weren't the first union officials to decide that the best way to secure their power was to deny any to the rank and file; Mr. McEntee's predecessor at AFSCME, the late Jerry Wurf, and those who succeeded him at DC 37, Victor Gotbaum and Stanley Hill, had all used it to their advantage. But the weakness of the system had been made apparent by the corruption scandal.

Costa's Money-Grab

Even as AFSCME sought to avert any future hijacking of the local's resources, it became clear that officials like Ms. Montgomery-Costa were part of the price that had to be paid for continuing the status quo. Right after she was first elected in June 1999, Lee Saunders, whom Mr. McEntee had placed in charge of the DC 37 clean-up, removed the local from the administratorship it was placed under 16 months earlier after Mr. Hughes was discovered to have placed it $10 million in debt.

Mr. Saunders had set a salary of $99,000 for the Local 372 president's job - less than half of what Mr. Hughes had been receiving when he was ousted - and Ms. Montgomery-Costa apparently considered this an injustice that ranked right up there with her predecessor's misdeeds. Three months after she took office, her board voted to raise her salary by $36,000.

A column in this space suggested that she had taken Mr. Saunders for a sap and questioned what she had done to warrant such a hasty and large pay hike. Mr. Saunders, with the power to banish the local's board and place it back under administratorship, instead chose a milder remedy, "persuading" Ms. Montgomery-Costa to forsake the pay increase.

As she and other members of DC 37's old guard began to chafe under Mr. Saunders's limits on largesse, reformers within the union also grew impatient at his resistance to their ideas for transforming its culture to make it more democratic. By the beginning of 2002, a peculiar alliance of the two groups produced enough pressure to prompt Mr. Saunders to lift the administratorship and return to Washington, with Ms. Roberts chosen as the compromise candidate to run DC 37.

Doubled-Down on Raise

Four months after she took office, it quickly became clear that she would be more indulgent of Ms. Montgomery-Costa's greed and arrogance.

At the first union meeting after the Local 372 president was re-elected - although with just 475 votes - her board raised her salary by $76,000, to $175,000, and reportedly made the increase retroactive to the start of her first term.

Ms. Montgomery-Costa undoubtedly viewed this as an in-your-face gesture aimed at Mr. Saunders, and secondarily at this newspaper. The reality is, it was a thumb in the eye to every member of her union, none of whom is paid nearly as much by the Department of Education as the amount of the salary hike. But when Ms. Roberts was asked about it, she pointed out that DC 37's locals were autonomous and said it was not for her to question whether the size of the raise, or its retroactivity, was appropriate.

One of her opponents in this week's election, Jesse Teitler, has claimed that Ms. Montgomery-Costa has gotten subsequent increases and that her total compensation, including the more-than $50,000 she receives as president of DC 37, exceeds $400,000.

Mr. Teitler offered no documentation of that claim, and Ms. Montgomery-Costa, asked last month by this newspaper's Michelle Friedman what her Local 372 salary is, responded by laughing. Neither she nor anyone else within the local has responded to a Freedom of Information Law request about her salary.

Not Likely Pay Was Frozen

It's hard to imagine, however, that she would have gone without a pay raise in the six years since the $76,000 hike. Particularly not when Ms. Roberts last year had her salary boosted by $35,000, bringing it to $285,000. Big salaries that are not based on achievement are a hallmark of not only DC 37 but of AFSCME - Mr. McEntee two years ago was revealed to be receiving $585,000 in total compensation.

His own gravy train may have reached the end of the road as a result of his ill-fated involvement in Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. For the third straight national election, Mr. McEntee produced an early and ill-fated endorsement for a Democratic candidate - he backed Al Gore more than a year before the 2000 election and Howard Dean before the calendar turned to 2004 and his campaign melted before the snows of New Hampshire did.

Trying to recapture the magic he found with his 1992 endorsement of Bill Clinton, Mr. McEntee essentially threw away the steering wheel as he drove ahead on behalf of Hillary while attempting to run Barack Obama into a ditch before his campaign got real traction. His attack ads against Mr. Obama prior to the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary actually contradicted a position AFSCME had previously taken on health-care plans and prompted seven of the union's international vice presidents to send an angry letter to Mr. McEntee chastising him for "such a wholesale assault on one of the great friends of our union."

Faces Stiff Election Challenge

Mr. McEntee's continued advocacy on behalf of Ms. Clinton since then has raised questions about whether an Obama presidency could lead the AFL-CIO to remove the AFSCME leader from his post on its political action committee, and has assured that he will face a serious challenge for re-election at his own union's convention next month. One union veteran said opposition was likely to be spearheaded by district councils in the West and Midwest that took strong exception to the stridency of his anti-Obama campaign - ''the money that he spent, the way he spent it, the ads that he put on."

Ms. Roberts was said by one union source to have told AFSCME officials that she would step down following the convention, only to reconsider and say that she didn't see any reason why she should retire if Mr. McEntee planned to stay on. One union official said any past promise she made about retiring should be taken no more seriously than the assurance she was supposed to have given Charles Ensley - the leader of the reformers when the deal was reached to have her become executive director - that she would retire rather than seeking a second term. She went on to win two re-election runs against Mr. Ensley, who himself retired in April.

"She's not leaving," this official said flatly. "She's got no intentions of leaving and never had."

Outlasted Reformers

Ms. Roberts's lack of accomplishments in office may suggest she is an impediment to DC 37 regaining its stature as a powerful union. But her political smarts have actually consolidated her power and left the reform movement within the union beaten down and adrift: the reformers, who had a slight majority on the board after her first re-election in 2004, now have just one seat.

That is why one reformer, describing the general feeling within the union, said last week, "There is a deep depression and the feeling is we can't get [anything] done."

That dynamic would instantly change if Ms. Montgomery-Costa were defeated, even though it wouldn't completely swing the balance of power to the reformers. It would send a signal that the rank and file, even without the right to choose DC 37's top officers, could hold them accountable at the local level - if she lost the Local 372 position, Ms. Montgomery-Costa would also have to give up her position as DC 37 president.

A Test for '372' Members

For years, some reformers have bristled at the fact that the size of Locals 372 and 1549 gives their presidents domineering influence over DC 37's operations even though they have often acted to discourage member activism while living large at the expense of their rank and files. This week's election will test whether Local 372 members are tired of being treated so cavalierly and ready to make a statement that their needs can't be ignored while Ms. Montgomery-Costa gets rich on their dues money.

A mail ballot without question would ensure the greatest participation by members because of the convenience it brings to the voting process. But stuck with a walk-in vote, members have to ask themselves whether whatever hardships are involved in making one trip to DC 37's headquarters are outweighed by the chance to seize their own destiny.

They have a chance to make clear that someone who thinks the support of two percent of them is validation enough to do whatever she pleases has no business representing them. Whether they do so will tell a lot about DC 37's future.