Providence Mayor David N. Cicilline holds a news conference in his office at City Hall to discuss key provisions of the latest contract offer to members of Local 799, the Providence firefighters union. The Providence Journal / Connie Grosch

PROVIDENCE — Following the lead of Vice President Joe Biden and top members of President Obama’s Cabinet, nearly 100 other federal officials and their staff are expected to stay away from a major gathering of American mayors here this week in light of threatened union demonstrations against Mayor David N. Cicilline.

Those include about 30 lower-ranking officials who were to be panelists in workshops and whose staffs would have manned a resource center to be set up by the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs dealing specifically with Mr. Obama’s stimulus plan.

“This goes beyond the vice president and the Cabinet,” said Thomas Cochran, executive director of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. “We’re shocked. This has never happened in the history of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. These people have been confirmed for two weeks. They committed to this. We met with President Obama’s staff to design this conference and now the Office of the President is pulling out at the request of a [firefighters] union. It’s unprecedented.”

Cochran said organizers of the meeting, scheduled to open Friday, are revising the four-day agenda, which had been built around the mayors having exclusive access to federal officials throughout the conference.

Cicilline said that he does not intend to bow to city firefighters’ request that he step aside from hosting the conference in order to allow members of President Obama’s administration, which has a policy of not crossing union picket lines, to attend.

“My parents raised me better than that,” he said Monday. “I’ve been very involved and worked hard to bring this to Providence, and I intend to be its host.”

Cochran, of the conference of mayors, said that the conference’s executive board, which includes the current president, Miami Mayor Manuel Diaz, and past presidents, voted unanimously to support Cicilline during a conference call on Monday.

“This is a local labor dispute that the International Association of Fire Fighters has taken to the White House,” said Cochran.

Mayors, including Cicilline, have said they were looking forward to better relations with the White House with the ascendancy of Mr. Obama, who was seen as generally more sympathetic to urban issues than his predecessor.

“We had high hopes for this administration,” said Cochran. “In a way, the White House has taken sides with the unions against the mayors. We hope we can get through this.”

The mayors’ conference, holding its annual gathering in Rhode Island for the first time in its 77-year existence, has routinely seen protests. But they had not affected the workings of the meeting, according to Cicilline.

“I don’t know a U.S. Conference of Mayors meeting where they haven’t had protests,” he said. “It comes with the territory.”

At a news conference at City Hall, Cicilline outlined an offer he submitted to the firefighters two weeks ago and called on union officials to give their members an opportunity to ratify the proposal.

About 180 mayors are registered for the conference. None has canceled, according to Cochran. Mayors contacted on Monday confirmed as much.

“I wouldn’t miss this conference for anything,” said Mayor Virginia Dupuy, of Waco, Texas. “I’ve not been to Providence before. I understand it’s absolutely beautiful.”

“It is regrettable that mayors from across the nation will not be able to dialogue with the administration because of an issue that is not national in scope but local,” said Bowling Green [Ky.] Mayor Elaine N. Walker, who said she plans to attend.

Featured speakers, among them Colombian President Alvaro Uribe Velez and Mexican Ambassador Arturo Sarukhan Casamitjana, are still expected to attend. “We will have a great meeting, but there will be a cloud over it,” said Cochran.

This year, the meeting was to be focused on President Obama’s economic stimulus plan, largely embodied in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Key members of his Cabinet, including the secretaries of the departments of Housing and Urban Development, Labor and Commerce, and the attorney general, were scheduled speakers, as was Biden.

So, too, were a number of lower-ranking federal officials, such as Ron Sims, deputy HUD secretary; Gil Sperling, program manager for the Office of Weatherization and Intergovernmental Programs in the U.S. Department of Energy, and Arnold Jackson, associate director for the decennial census in the U.S. Census Bureau.

Federal staff were also to be on hand throughout the conference. For some small cities and towns, the conference represented a rare opportunity to meet directly with federal officials from Washington.

“We were going to have it so that the mayor from Duluth, for example, could go to this resource center and meet with every department that is dealing with the stimulus plan and get their questions answered so that they could help their communities,” said Cochran. “They were going to bring their technical people and they could meet with the technical people from the federal departments. It was a great design.”

Now all of that must be reorganized following White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs’ announcement on Friday that the Obama administration would heed the International Association of Fire Fighters’ request to honor the picket lines planned by its Local 799.

Union officials say they are expecting a large turnout for the picket, which they say will run Friday through Monday during conference hours (typically 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.) and at certain evening events.

Jeffrey Zack, of the national office of the International Association of Fire Fighters, said that members of a number of other locals intend to fly into Providence to picket alongside Local 799 members.

Contacted at a conference of firefighters in Miami on Monday, Paul Doughty, president of Local 799, said he is encouraging firefighters, both nationally and statewide, to come out and support their union brethren in Providence.

Local 799, which represents some 500 city firefighters, has been in a contract dispute with the city that stretches back a decade. The last contract was reached in 2000.

Lodge 3 of the Fraternal Order of Police, which represents about 475 city officers, has been without a new contract since 2007.

Both unions are protesting the mayor’s attempts to unilaterally change health and pension benefits for all city workers this year to close a $17-million deficit.

––With staff reports from Lynn Arditi and Karen Lee Ziner

pmarcelo@projo.com