On Monday, July 15, the Denver City Council agreed to refer to a voters a measure hugely expanding the number of public employees who would qualify for collective bargaining.
The measure would confer bargaining rights on “employees of executive agencies and departments under the Mayor,” and, “employees of Denver Water, the Denver Library, the City Council, the County Court, the Civil Service Commission, the Board of Adjustment and certain employees of the Auditor and Clerk and Recorder.” All of these employees would also gain a right to strike, except for the County Court and Denver Water.
Naturally, the summary of the bill in the agenda emphasizes libraries and Denver Water, and no doubt those will be front-and-center in the ballot language.
The ballot measure continues a years-long trend in Colorado of increasing the power of public employee unions and will likely have the same effect of increasing costs at the expense of citizens.
In 2020, in the midst of a pandemic where government employees faced limited furloughs and virtually no layoffs, Gov. Jared Polis signed House Bill 20-1153, allowing state employees to collectively bargain through Colorado WINS. Two years later, Polis signed Senate Bill 22-230, requiring counties with populations of at least 7,500 to recognize and negotiate with public employee unions. And last year, he signed Senate Bill 23-111, letting city, school, and public university employees lay all of the groundwork for unionizing.
At a time when Denver is swimming in tax revenue and yet the elected officials still want more, it’s a terrible idea to be introducing more public employee unions to the city. Significantly, Senate Bill 230 specifically did not apply to the cities of Denver and Broomfield, which are also counties, so Denver is doing this on its own, not in response to any state requirement.
It’s not as though city employees aren’t doing fairly well as it is.
Take the Denver Employees Retirement Program (DERP), whose funding levels continue to languish in the dangerously low 60% range. A large part of the problem are recent unexpectedly large salary hikes that outstrip both high inflation and civilian wage growth in the city.
In further proof that history rhymes, outsized salary increases were also the common response by municipal and state governments in the 1960s and 1970s to that era’s high inflation, and they produced similar results, destabilizing public pension plans all around the country.
And Denver was proud of the fact that no city employees were furloughed or let go during Covid, although in later years there were some reductions in staff using attrition, not replacing employees who left.
Research shows that while unionizing specific operations doesn’t necessarily increase the cost of government overall, it does increase the cost of government in those operations with bargaining units. But the City Council and Mayor are proposing to unionize almost the whole of city government, so in this case, we can expect to see the overall cost of government grow significantly, without delivering better, more timely, more competent, or more efficient services to the public.
Leading with the library employees is rich, given that the libraries were a leading cause during the campaign for a recent significant tax increase. In November 2022, voters approved measure 2I, a 1.5 mil increase in property tax. It was projected to produce $30 million in new tax revenue, with a total capped at $36 million in 2023, and then allowed to increase without limit. Now, we’re being asked to take a step which will further increase the cost of libraries, which will no doubt be used to ask for even more money sometime in the next few years.
The council’s actions are also in line with research showing that while union campaign contributions don’t necessarily buy loyalty, they do go to friendly candidates, who then enact more union-friendly policies and legislation. Five of the current city council members were maxed out in their 2019 campaigns by the leading local government union, the SEIU: Amanda Sandoval, Amanda Sawyer, Chris Hinds, Paul Kashmann, and Stacie Gilmore. Time to deliver on those promises, it seems.
According to Truth In Accounting’s annual Financial State of the Cities report, Denver is already a sinkhole city, with not enough money to cover its obligations, to the tune of about $6400 per taxpayer. And according to the latest PODS report, Denver is now the #12 city in the country for people to leave.
Adding the burden of a unionized city workforce will only make things more expensive. Those taxpayers who are able to leave will do so, and those who are worse off will be left behind with the bill.
Joshua Sharf is a Denver resident and a senior fellow in fiscal policy at the Independence Institute, a free market think tank.
