NY Daily News – July 14, 2015
by Erin Durkin
The firefighters’ union plans to sue City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito over the Council’s role in thwarting a more generous disability pension package for uniformed workers, the group said.
Uniformed Firefighters Association president Steve Cassidy and newly hired firefighters will hit the Council with a suit Tuesday charging that “over nearly a 10-month period the Council leadership interfered with the legislative process (and) ignored its own transparency and inclusiveness rules,” according to a media advisory released Monday.
The Council threw its support behind Mayor de Blasio’s pension plan for cops and firefighters on disability in a last-minute vote in June. Notice went out that the item had been added to the agenda just half an hour before a morning hearing, and it was debated and voted on the same day, drawing fierce criticism from the union.
A competing resolution to back the pension deal the unions want – which would give all seriously injured service members 75% of their salary in disability benefits regardless of when they were hired – never got a vote, despite backing by a veto-proof majority of Council members.
UFA also charges the speaker’s office used attorney-client privilege to avoid disclosing public documents under the Freedom of Information Law.
Details of the legal claims were not immediately available before the lawsuit was filed Tuesday.
A Mark-Viverito spokesman said he could not comment before seeing the lawsuit but said, “We have a commitment to transparency.”
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