By Jordan Jones
In City of Troy, the arbitrator rejected a grievance over the City’s denial of a police officer’s tuition reimbursement request due to the City’s budgetary constraints.
Police officer Misirian informed his employer that he planned on registering for two graduate courses at a university and that he was seeking tuition reimbursement. The City subsequently denied the police officer’s request stating that “2013 [f]unding does not allow for tuition reimbursement at this time.” In other words, the City claimed their budget would not allow for it.
The City contended the language of the collective-bargaining agreement was unambiguous that tuition reimbursement requests were subject to the Employer’s “budgetary constraints” and the refund of tuition expenses was discretionary and non-mandatory. The City further argued that it was under true budget constraints that have resulted in the loss or delay of services to its citizens and a reduction in manpower.
The police union argued that “[s]imply uttering the words ‘budgetary constraints’ does not allow the Employer to unilaterally take away a negotiated contractual benefit . . . [and the] Employer has had and always will have budgetary constraints.” The union added that “discretionary actions must meet the ‘arbitrary, capricious or taken in bad faith’ standard . . . [and the] phrase ‘budgetary constraints’ cannot be stretched to the horizon.
The arbitrator looked at both the CBA and the City’s policies. The arbitrator stated that:
By agreeing on a Tuition Reimbursement Policy conditioning reimbursement “on the City’s budgetary constraints” the parties made it extremely difficult for an arbitrator to invalidate decisions under the “arbitrary, capricious or taken in bad faith” standard.
The arbitrator denied the police officer’s grievance and held that “[t]he negotiated language leaves the decision with . . . [the city and the arbitrator must] apply the labor agreement as written rather than on the basis of his own notions of building a police department.”
Editor’s Note (Jim Cline): Words matter. The job of an arbitrator isn’t to assess how the contract should be written, but how to apply the words the parties mutually adopted. In this case, the insertion of the budgetary constraints clause necessarily provided the City fairly broad discretion in determining the level of tuition reimbursement to be allowed. This arbitrator adopted the mainstream approach to this issue: Unless the union could show that the application was wholly arbitrary or discriminatory, it was within the City’s discretion to determine the level of funding.
