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by MICHAEL SCHOLL
A pair of rolling billboards hit the streets yesterday as part of a campaign by city police and fire unions to shame Mayor Michael Bloomberg into giving their members a significant pay raise.
The billboards were paid for by the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association and the Uniformed Firefighters Association. The two unions are engaged in a contentious salary dispute with Bloomberg, who is resisting their demands for a raise larger than the hike recently awarded to most of the city's nonuniformed workers.
The billboards denounce "Billionaire Bloomberg" and calls on city residents to "dial 311 now and tell Bloomberg to give cops and firefighters a real raise."
The two 16- by 8-foot signs are mounted on the back of trucks that will drive throughout all five boroughs during a multiday tour that began yesterday, according to UFA President Stephen Cassidy, who unveiled the billboards yesterday during a press conference with PBA President Patrick Lynch.
"Firefighters and police officers, who have been trying to negotiate a fair contract with this mayor who doesn't care about us, have had no success," Cassidy said. "We're going to continue to fight to get what's fair."
"This mayor is not paying a livable wage to the people that take those muggers off the street and put out those fires that endanger our children," Lynch said.
A billboard truck will appear on Staten Island tomorrow, according to PBA spokesman Al O'Leary, who said it would be driven along Capodanno Boulevard and around the Staten Island Mall.
The moving billboards will appear throughout the city for at least the next week, and will likely make an encore appearance when the Republican National Convention is held Aug. 30 through Sept. 2 at Madison Square Garden, Cassidy said. Bloomberg administration negotiators want the PBA and UFA to accept deals similar to those agreed to earlier this year by the city's largest municipal union, District Council 37, and by some other smaller unions.
Workers covered by those deals were granted a 3 percent wage increase retroactive to July 1, 2003; a 2 percent pay increase effective July 1 of this year and a possible 1 percent increase later this year if productivity goals are met. Each worker also received a one-time $1,000 bonus.
PBA and UFA officials say those kinds of raises would not adequately compensate police officers and firefighters for the dangerous work they perform and would leave them with salaries lower than those their police and fire colleagues earn in the suburbs.
The United Federation of Teachers has joined the PBA and UFA in refusing to agree to contract terms mirroring those accepted by DC 37. Yesterday, the mayor said union publicity campaigns were counterproductive and that the UFA and PBA should focus their energies on negotiations.
The mayor has said the salary demands of cops and firefighters were unrealistic, given the city's fiscal situation. "The city does not have a lot of money," Bloomberg said. "We have enormous deficits staring us in the face."
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