University students and the campus community will be without bus service during Dead Week and Finals Week if Friday’s bargaining session between Lane Transit District and the union representing more than 75 percent of its employees fails to produce a contract agreement. The union has declared a strike date of March 7.
“This is the biggest crisis Lane Transit has been in, ever,” said Carol Allred, executive board officer for the Amalgamated Transit Union Division 757 and an
LTD driver.
The two sides met with a professional mediator Friday, and ATU Vice President Jonathan Hunt said though he is hopeful a settlement will be reached, he will be meeting with the union’s action committee today to plan and strategize for a strike he says union members are prepared to go through with.
“We do not want to go strike, but it would be foolish to wait ’til Friday to start to prepare,” Allred said.
Friday’s mediation session lasted more than eight hours, with union representatives and LTD representatives in separate rooms of the Hilton Eugene Hotel and professional mediator Wendy Greenwald serving as a room-to-room messenger and negotiation facilitator between the two bargaining sides.
Both sides contend the other failed to bring anything new to the bargaining table. Hunt accused LTD of merely “shuffling stuff around,” and LTD Service Planning and Marketing Manager Andy Vobora dismissed the union’s claim of agreeing to the district’s proposed health-care plan and saving the district more than $332,000 with its new offer.
“While we had some agreement on the type of plan, we were still off on the cost,” Vobora said.
Hunt said the union proposed a one-year wage freeze.
But Vobora said because the freeze would apply to the contract that expires on June 30, it did not make sense to freeze wages after implementing a wage increase with the current contract offer.
“It would expire June 30 — we would never stop bargaining,” Vobora said about the wage freeze. “We would really prefer to have a three-year contract.”
Vobora said LTD’s revised contract offer included the removal of the previously proposed 10-minute bus safety inspection time, which was the source of several claims filed in Lane County Circuit Court last week.
A judge dismissed two claims Thursday that LTD drivers and union representatives filed to stop LTD from implementing the change from a 15-minute bus safety inspection time to a 10-minute time.
A disabled LTD rider filed a similar claim against the district, and there will be a hearing Thursday
to decide whether LTD is permitted to reduce safety inspection time
in light of laws protecting
disabled passengers.
“It didn’t mean a thing to me that they withdrew that because it never should have been on the table, according to the judge,” Allred said, referring to the judge’s skepticism about the legal reasoning behind the district’s change in safety inspection time.
Allred said that if the district was really serious about withdrawing the safety inspection time change, it would not have implemented the change reducing the safety inspection time on Sunday.
Neither side expects to offer any significant changes during Friday’s mediation session because both say they have stretched as far as they can.
Vobora said the 4 percent wage increase the LTD Board of Directors had previously asked for when the contract negotiations began in May has increased to around 5 percent.
“They were willing to do that to try to get a settlement,” Vobora said.
But Hunt and Allred both said the main problem lies in the spending habits of the district. LTD has plenty of surplus funds but wants to save them for “a rainy day,” Hunt said.
But, Hunt said, when the
bus drivers are preparing to go
out on strike, “it sounds like it’s pouring out.”
“We’re not going to let them balance their budget on our members’ backs,” Hunt said.
Vobora said he will be meeting with the district’s negotiating team today to debrief its members on Friday’s mediation session, but he said he is not sure whether the board will meet this week to discuss any possible alterations to Friday’s
contract offer.
LTD General Manager Ken Hamm is at a conference with city officials in Washington, D.C., and will not
be available to meet this week,
Vobora said.
Allred said Hamm’s absence is a reflection of his lack of concern for the contract negotiations, adding that the union’s business representative was scheduled to attend the same conference but decided not to go because of the pending driver strike.
Vobora said Hamm’s absence is not problematic because the district does not believe there is much more to discuss about the contract offers.

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