School contract negotiations to resume Tuesday

Negotiations between the Rio Rancho Public Schools and the labor union that represents most of its employees will resume next week after the district's labor relations board ordered both sides back to the bargaining table and dismissing a prohibitive practice complaint by the union.

Four bargaining sessions were agreed to by both sides after the board ruled on a complaint by Rio Rancho School Employees Union, Local 4933, at a hearing Friday morning.  The sessions are scheduled to start Tuesday at 5 p.m. in Classroom One of the district office, with subsequent sessions set for July 18 from 12:30 to 1:45 p.m. in the district board room and July 22 and July 28 at 1 p.m. in a conference room at the Hilton Garden Inn.

The agreement of time, date and place of the sessions was negotiated after the board's decision, which gave both sides a little bit of what they wanted. In addition to dismissing the prohibitive practice complaint against the district, the board also agreed to "hold in abeyance" a motion to dismiss the district's counterclaim against the union.

The union did achieve a victory, however, when the board announced in a written statement that it "interprets impasse to mean a failure to agree on all permissive and mandatory subjects of bargaining that have been proposed."  The district had contended it could seek impasse status, the first step toward arbitration, on individual issues within the collective bargaining agreement, while the union believed all items under negotiation need be discussed before an impasse could be declared.

The union had claimed that the district had not been acting in good faith by attempting to impose new ground rules for negotiations, saying the changes were unnecessary because they are already included in state labor law. The district contended the ground rules were the same as have were used in contract negotiations in 2005 and 2007.

 When the two sides couldn't agree on the ground rules, the union filed its complaint on May 16, a day after initial negotiations broke off.

"The board believes the PPC was premature by not continuing to bargain the ground rules and not having proposed mandatory subjects of bargaining," the three-man board ruled unanimously in its written decision issued after a 30-minute executive session. "We are ordering the parties to return to bargaining."