'A different profession now’

Blooming Prairie appears to be the exception to an unwritten rule.

That’s according to Jim Mortenson, executive director of the Minnesota Law Enforcement Labor Services.

“For Blooming Prairie not to be unionized – when you look at government workers in general, or public safety workers, specifically – is really an anomaly,” he said.

“I’ve only run into this one other time – having a city that nobody has organized in,” Mortenson said. “It’s really a rarity for us to come into any community where there is no other bargaining unit, whether it’s public works or” another city department.

Members of the Blooming Prairie Police Department may be the first city employees to form their own bargaining unit, “and that’s the direction they’re heading in,” Mortenson said.

Interim City Administrator Terri Zwiener made the announcement at the July 14 BP City Council meeting.

“I received notice on June 30 that the Blooming Prairie Police Department is unionizing,” she said. “I have received and posted the maintenance of status quo,” which means the employees must continue to be paid and scheduled exactly the way they have been.

“I have calls in to the State of Minnesota and the League of Minnesota Cities for direction on this,” Zwiener said, with a focus on a memorandum of understanding between the department and the city that was not approved by the city council.

Council members seemed surprised by the news.

“What’s the main drive in that?” asked Mayor Mike Ressler.

“I think you’d have to ask them,” said City Attorney Jason Iacovino, “but it’s not uncommon for law enforcement to be part of a union; our department just has not been. If you’re asking what the motivation is, I can’t answer that, because I’m not a peace officer.”

Only three of the nine members of the BPPD would be eligible to join the bargaining unit. Chief Greg Skillestad is considered management; several others do not work the required number of hours.

Those three will decide, with a vote among them, “whether they want to do this or not,” Iacovino said, “and I don’t know that that’s happened yet. That’s where we’re at in the process.”

So far, a petition has been filed with the Bureau of Mediation Services, “which controls the process,” Mortenson said. “We wait until they finish,” which is generally within 30 to 45 days.

“The employees are very satisfied with the employer and the community,” he said. “They had nothing but good things to say about that, and said they have a lot of good support from community members – which I don’t always get to hear.

“But we’re a different profession now in law enforcement, and these folks have a way tougher job than when I started in 1987,” said Mortenson, who spent his career in law enforcement in St. Cloud.

“If you look at what’s going on in the profession on a nationwide level, you have to have protections in place, whether it’s labor, criminal, civil … all those protections come with the services we provide,” he said.

“This, to us, is normal,” he added, “but some smaller communities or counties may need to be educated about it.”

LELS represents only public safety personnel: about 7,600 members from more than 275 different agencies in police, fire, dispatch, corrections and public safety support staff. They include members of the Minnesota Highway Patrol, Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and Department of Natural Resources.

Of the 87 sheriff’s offices in the state, LELS represents members in 80 of them, including employees at the Steele County Sheriff’s Office.

“Our goal is to work in conjunction with the city,” Mortenson said, “and have a good working relationship with the city of Blooming Prairie.”

Anthony Martens, the new city administrator for BP, “is very used to dealing with us, because we have New Richland Police Department as one of our bargaining units,” Mortenson said. “It may be foreign to the city, but not to him.”

Martens, currently the New Richland City Administrator, is expected to start locally on Aug. 18.

“Having a new administrator that knows exactly how this works is valuable, because one, he was a police officer; and two, he’s coming from a community that had an LELS bargaining unit,” Mortenson said.

“This’ll be nothing for him to navigate.”