Carcieri

PROVIDENCE — The governor’s plan to impose higher health-insurance rates on thousands of unionized state employees who rejected a recent contract proposal is on hold until at least mid-month, while a Superior Court judge decides whether Carcieri’s actions should be barred.

In a closed-door meeting, Judge Patricia A. Hurst yesterday delayed ruling for up to two weeks on whether to grant a restraining order, offering the largest state employees’ union — Council 94, of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees — a chance to respond to allegations laid out by the governor’s office in papers filed just minutes before that gathering.

Carcieri, meanwhile, has agreed to hold off imposing his executive order, slated to take effect with tomorrow’s paychecks, his lawyer said yesterday.

In its 26-page brief, the state offers new ammunition against Council 94, saying the union’s failure to ratify the agreement brokered in part by its own leaders left it without contractual protections. By the time members rejected the plan, the state had already notified the union that the terms of the old deal were to have expired June 30.

Carcieri’s lawyers said he needed the increased health-insurance contributions to help balance the state budget and avoid a $425-million deficit. The contract was also to have delayed pay raises, thus saving the state a total of $10 million this year.

But aside from the savings, state lawyers argued that the plan wasn’t the raw deal it was made out to be. The order forces the 4,000 workers covered under the umbrella of Council 94’s contract to pay a percentage of their health-care premiums instead of paying costs based on a percentage of their salary, as they have previously done.

Through that plan, 20 percent of Council 94 members would actually pay less for health insurance than they do now, and no state employees would pay more than 18 percent of their yearly premium, it says.

That’s generous compared with the federal government, where most employees pay 25 percent of their premiums; and with Massachusetts, where state workers making less than $50,000 still pay more than any Council 94 employee, the brief says.

“The rates were obviously considered reasonable to the Council 94’s leadership representatives who negotiated with the governor and signed the [memorandum of settlement],” Carcieri’s chief legal counsel, Kernan F. King, and other state lawyers write in the court papers.

In a hefty court brief filed two days earlier, however, lawyers for Council 94 laid out a very different picture, saying the state’s plan to implement policies it hasn’t negotiated with the union amounted to a collective-bargaining violation that would hit the lowest-paid workers, including janitors and secretaries with family plans, the hardest. Seventy percent of Council 94 members earn $40,000 or less per year.

Union representatives did not respond to the Carcieri administration’s accusations yesterday, saying they had not yet seen a copy of the state’s court brief.

At the heart of this fight is the question of what constitutes formal negotiations and whether they actually took place.

Carcieri argues that the nearly 30 meetings held between the two parties throughout the spring and early summer to hammer out an agreement constituted negotiations.

Council 94 insists those meetings were simply “talks” led by a few select representatives from each side. “From the onset of these discussions, it was acknowledged by all participants that these discussions did not constitute collective-bargaining negotiations as that term is defined by the [State Employees Arbitration Act],” it says.

“The reason that was done was so that at the end of the process, if we didn’t come to any sort of agreement we could go to our normal process of negotiation,” Council 94 executive director Dennis R. Grilli said outside Providence Superior Court yesterday.

He acknowledged, however, that the terms of the talks were never put in writing.

The union says the governor’s office is now bound by state law to commence good-faith negotiations, but the Carcieri administration refuses to return to the bargaining table, insisting it already invested countless hours with union leaders negotiating what everyone felt was a fair deal given Rhode Island’s fiscal crunch.

The administration, it said, can’t be blamed if the membership then overwhelmingly defeated the proposal.

Now the two sides will have to wait until Hurst issues her decision, which she is expected to do from the bench within 14 days. She is not expected to hear any oral arguments before ruling, lawyers for both sides said yesterday.

The case is also before the state’s Labor Relations Board, which will hold a hearing to determine the merits of Council 94’s complaint against the governor.

cneedham@projo.com