Claim of mistake does not permit a party to rescind provisions set out in collective bargaining agreement

Claim of mistake does not permit a party to rescind provisions set out in collective bargaining agreement
Plattsburgh v Plattsburgh Police Officers Union, 250 AD2d 327, motion to appeal denied, 93 NY2d 807

Disabled firefighters and disabled police officers are entitled to significantly different benefits under New York’s General Municipal Law, Sections 207-a (firefighters) and 207-c (police officers).

If a police collective bargaining agreement dealing with disability benefits cites General Municipal Law Section 207-a as the basis for providing such benefits, does this give police officers the right to disability benefits ordinarily reserved for firefighters? And if the municipality claims the citation of GML 207-a rather than GML 207-c was an error on the part of both parties, does this mean the parties must be required to re-negotiate the contract?

The Appellate Division considered these questions in the Plattsburgh case. The City of Plattsburgh and its police officers union agreed while negotiating their 1995-1998 Taylor Law contract to include a provision -- referred to as the “207-c benefits” -- in the agreement. The contract’s “207-c benefits” clause provided that permanently disabled police officers would receive the same benefits provided permanently disabled firefighters pursuant to GML Sect. 207-a.

The benefits under 207-a and 207-c are nearly identical except for retirement salary supplements. If a firefighter is receiving an accidental or line-of-duty disability retirement allowance, the municipality must pay him or her a supplement to bring his or her income up to the level of compensation that the firefighter would have earned had he or she not been disabled. This supplement is paid until the firefighter attains the mandatory age of retirement or he or she completes the period of service required before he or she could be terminated or retired. However, Section 207-c does not require municipalities to pay such salary supplements upon a disabled police officer’s retirement.

How Section 207-a became cited in the Plattsburgh police agreement is a bit of a mystery. According to court documents, city officials drafted the agreement after looking at several models provided by the union. These included police contracts that cited 207-c as well as the city’s own agreement with its firefighters, which cited 207-a. It is common practice to borrow language from reference agreements, which might explain how the 207-a benefit may have been negotiated for the police.

Plattsburgh city officials claimed they discovered the “mistaken inclusion of this [207-a] benefit” in 1966. However, nothing much happened until February 4, 1997 when a permanently disabled police officer applied for a disability benefit under the terms of the agreement.

When Plattsburgh refused to pay the benefit, the union demanded arbitration. The city asked a state Supreme Court judge, and later the Appellate Division, for a stay of arbitration. It further requested “reformation of the 207-c agreement on the ground of mutual mistake.”

The Appellate Division said that in an application for a stay of arbitration of a public sector labor dispute, two tests are applied: (1) does a statute, court decision or public policy bar arbitration of the matter in accordance with the Taylor Law? and (2) do the terms of the contract’s arbitration clause include the subject matter of the dispute?

The Appellate Division found that the parties should submit the matter to arbitration.

Plattsburgh contended that the 207-c agreement “runs afoul” of statutes prohibiting public employers and employees from negotiating with respect to any benefit provided by a public retirement system [Section 470, Retirement and Social Security Law].

The Appellate Division brushed aside that objection, holding that the contract provided 207-c benefits were not statutorily prohibited since they do not affect the benefit the individual would receive from the retirement system.

In addition, the Appellate Division pointed out that the Public Employment Relations Board had previously decided that GML Section 207-c “establishes a floor below which an employee’s benefits may not fall and, thus, a public employer may, pursuant to collective bargaining negotiations, provide benefits to their employees in excess of those provided by GML 207-c [Matter of CSEA Local 830, 23 PERB 4595].

As to Plattsburgh’s motion to stay the arbitration and hold a judicial hearing on the issue of reformation of its 207-c agreement, the Appellate Division pointed out that “the scope of the substantive provisions of the collective bargaining agreement, including the failure to reflect a meeting of the minds, is for the arbitrator to decide.”

Ultimately, the arbitrator, Howard A. Rubenstein, Esq., ruled that the language used in the collective bargaining agreement controlled and thus the City was required to provide its police officers disabled in the performance of their law enforcement duties the benefits provided firefighters mandated by General Municipal Law Section 207-a.
NYPPL