Union Negotiations Continue
Between Sheriff’s Dept., County

By Gordon HopkinsThe Law Enforcement Committee met on Tuesday, April 26, at the Fairbury City Offices. The committee is part of the contract between the City of Fairbury and Jefferson County when the county took over law enforcement duties from the Fairbury City Police Department in 2018.Going forward, the committee is expected to meet on a quarterly basis. The purpose of the meeting is to coordinate between the city and county and keep the city apprised of the activities of the sheriff’s office and expenses.Union NegotiationsThe county has begun talks with the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), the union that members of the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office joined. Unions allow for ‘collective bargaining,’ meaning they negotiate for all workers in the union, rather than having each worker negotiate individually.Sheriff Nick Georgi reported, “We’ve had our initial meeting, where we exchanged contracts. That’s the only meeting we’ve had. We got another one in two weeks. We’ll kind of start negotiating things that we both offered.”There has been concern among the Fairbury City Council, as well as Jefferson County Commissioners, that the union will increase the costs of law enforcement. The county recently increased the pay of law reinforcement employees to make it more in line with the state. Last year, the county approved a 4.3 percent raise for deputies along with a new pay scale, based on a comparability study, created to determine the appropriate wages.FOP has also done a comparability study.“Major things that they were asking for it was about an eight-and-a-half percent raise, and then four percent at the beginning of the year,” the sheriff said.“Obviously, we think that’s a little high,” Georgi said. “But I think their comparability study was similar to ours. It’s just, we went with a median, kind of the middle range, and they’re starting up on the high end.”Deputies are not obligated to join the union. All deputies will get all the benefits of a union contract whether or not they are dues paying members. However, deputies that are not members of the union will not get legal representation in the event of a dispute.Budget“We had our initial budget meeting,” said Georgi. “The only increases that we’re going to foresee, which we don’t know yet, would be wages and health insurance.”“The state did that massive raise for corrections. So, a lot of agencies with prisons and safe facilities near them, they’re losing deputies and police officers to the state facility,” said Georgi, who pointed out that a lot of Sheriff’s Offices and Police Departments are now having to raise wages to stop further losses.As for the insurance, Georgi sad, “Last year, our health insurance went up 9 percent. And that’s the bad thing about the timing. We don’t know how much that will go up (this year) till August.”National Night OutAfter having been forced to cancel National Night Out last year due to the pandemic, Georgi said the Sheriff’s Office will be holding the event this year on Tuesday, August 2, 2022.National Night Out is an annual community-building campaign intended to promote police-community partnerships and neighborhood camaraderie.The Sheriff spoke to Fairbury Rural Fire Chief Ken Krause and Ambulance Director Alan Rosenthal, “All the agencies were kind of excited to get it back going, so I registered us last week.”Georgi said, “So we’ll that to look forward to.”

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