Unalaska, AK – Stalled contract negotiations between public safety employees and the city government spilled over into the Unalaska City Council chambers for the second time in the past three months at last night's council meeting.

The occasion was the council's consideration of a new contract for City Manager Chris Hladick. During a public comment period at the meeting, public safety employee Brandon Hunter read a statement criticizing the contract, particularly the fact that it allowed for pay increases for Hladick while such increases for other city employees are currently frozen.

"I'd urge the council to consider the message approving this contract will send to other city employees," Hunter told council members. "Employees who have faithfully served our community for decades are being denied increases in their wages to compensate for a rapidly increasing cost of living."

The council approved Hladick's contract unanimously after little discussion, at which point public safety employees walked out of the room. One of them was Roger Bacon, who had spoken up at a meeting in August when the council addressed Hladick's contract. At the time, Bacon requested that Hladick's contract re-negotiation be delayed from September until after the city elections this month. That statement was taken as a clear sign that the local unions, which were supporting Shannon Morrison's campaign against incumbent mayor Shirley Marquardt, wanted to put the city manager on notice.

After leaving last night's meeting, Bacon said he was disturbed by the difference in tone between the city's negotiations with Hladick and Hladick's own negotiations with the city's unionized employees.

"Instead of sitting down at the table with us and negotiating with us in good faith, we get a bunch of rhetoric," Bacon said. "They deal with [Hladick] with respect and courtesy. We expect the same, and we're not getting it."

Public safety employees have been without a contract for nearly a year and a half now, since their negotiations with Hladick reached an impasse. They're currently awaiting arbitration.

Negotiations with the city employees' union have also made little progress since early this summer, when their contract expired. That's also holding back pay increases for the city's upper-level non-union employees, known as Title 3 employees, whose salaries and benefits are tied to what the unionized employees get.

Hladick's new contract says he will forgo merit-based pay raises as long as the Title 3 employees are doing the same. But his contract does include pay increases for cost-of-living adjustments.

Mayor Shirley Marquardt said it wasn't reasonable to compare the process of renegotiating Hladick's contract with the process of settling with the Public Safety Employees Association.

"There's a huge difference," she said. "[Hladick's] contract [has] five items in it, and a union contract might have 20 or 30 negotiating areas."

Marquardt added that settling Hladick's contract was crucial to keeping the city government on track.

"When you're talking about one contract employee who you depend on to move the city forward on its day-to-day administrative basis and all of its projects, and that contract's up, you negotiate that contract," she said.

Hladick himself would not comment on the controversy.