OCEA Membership Meeting — County Negotiations — May 27, 2026

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]Why don't we just go ahead and get this party started? By quick way of introduction. Hello OCA members. This is our big membership meeting. Today was day one of negotiations. And if you see in the participants list, you'll see an OCE assembly room. Just know that our entire bargaining team sends a few key individuals who will be speaking today are here at the OCA office. We just had our first meeting with the county where we gave our initial proposal. So we're going to get into a lot of that. But first, to give us a special OCA welcome, we have none other than OCA's president, Letty Guerrero. So, Letty, I'll turn it over to you.

[00:00:38]>> Thank you so much, Tim. Hi, everyone.

[00:00:40]Welcome. I am Letiero. I'm your OCA president. I'm also your county peer. I work as a defense investigator at the public defenders office where I've been for 21 years. I'm glad to share this day with you. Our first meeting with the county was good, as expected. a great start. A lot of work to do. A lot of things that are pending. I just wanted to remind you that we take this very seriously. I am humbled and privileged and extremely honored to take the lead in and advocating for our peers. You might remember that last fall we sent out a survey and you guys all responded and we took your concerns and we put them in place. Our staff here at OCA has worked relentlessly on establishing a good proposal, which is what we handed over today to the county. I just wanted to make sure that you guys knew that we did not ignore you, that your voice matters, that we will always push forward. That is my main concern to always speak and advocate for all my county peers. And that it's a privilege and it's my deepest honor to to take the lead here. And thank you. Thank you so much and keep staying with us. This is our union. We get to decide how big we want it. So, as long as we're together in unison and in solidarity moving forward, we will get to where we need to be and our voices will always be heard.

[00:02:00]I will assure you of that. Thank you.

[00:02:03]>> Thank you so much, Letty. Really appreciate the our support from our OCA board of directors. Union is ran by the membership and we have elected leaders who are workers, county workers just like you who are helping direct the direction of this union. So, here's what we're going to do today. We're go quick agenda review. You're going to hear from myself. You're going to hear from Veronica Rodarte, OCA's chief spokesperson. You'll hear from uh CB uh OCA's general manager. Um we will have some chance for questions. We'll try to get to all of them, we'll also have an opportunity, if we don't get to all of them, of how we can answer those questions. But hopefully your answer to your question will be met through our thorough presentation. So today we're going to quickly go over our negotiations team so you get an idea of who's at the table again for you and on behalf of the county. We have highlights from the county financial presentation that was given to the OCA bargaining team a couple of weeks back. We want to show you some of their slides and some of the data that they have presented to us in their own words. Then you're going to hear what we presented in in our own words, what the financial reality is for an OCA member. So, we want to make sure that you see the receipts that we brought to negotiations. We're going to go through some of the high-level concepts of our initial proposal that was literally given out just a few hours ago here at OCA, what those next steps are going to be in the coming weeks and then of course try to get an opportunity to answer as many questions as we can.

[00:03:31]So, with that, let's just level set real quick. A union exists to negotiate a strong contract and enforce that. Uh it is the reason why unions exist. It's to come together to enumerate in our contractor orou the protections, the proper pay, our retirement, everything that we take that we value as workers, we make sure it's enshrined in ourou or our contract. So when we say it is the it is the most important thing that a union does, we are not bsing. And so this process is really the most important thing that we do as a union. U so setting that up, I want to turn it over to OCA's operations manager, Veronica Rodarte, who's also serving as OCA's chief spokesperson. So I'll kick it over to you, Veronica.

[00:04:22]>> Thank you, Tim. Hi everyone. As Tim said, I'm Veronica and I have the true honor and privilege of serving as the chief spokesperson at the table um presenting our proposals on behalf of nearly 10,000 OCA members within the county. So, I don't take that responsibility lightly. We just finished in the room. So, I wanted to go over a little bit of who our primary bargaining team is. So, we have the names all listed on here. I won't read through all of them, but as you can see, we have a robust team that really covers many agencies within the county. All of these individuals applied to be on the bargaining team. They were interviewed.

[00:05:07]They were selected by our board, by our staff, and they all understand that they are in this process to advocate for membership as a whole. I'm really proud to say that none of our team members are in it for personal reasons. They really are here to advocate for all of you.

[00:05:26]They're dedicating a lot of their own time and having to sit in that room and listen to everything and just review a lot of information. But this is the list of our team. And then we also have some alternate members who sometimes fill in when our primary team members can't be at the table. So today I believe we had three alternate team members in the meeting room but these also represent various agencies. We pulled from many areas. We had a lot of applicants. It was really hard to pick who was going to be on our team. Uh we also have a robust uh alternate team and they actually get the full download the day after negotiation so that they know exactly what happened and they're prepared to fill in at any moment.

[00:06:16]on terms of staff of who's presenting on your behalf. So I'm the lead spokesperson, we also have our general counsel, Tia Grao there, and then CB, our general manager, and Tim Steed, who's our assistant general manager. And then we have various labor rep staff and some of our organizing staff from the county. Their chief spokesperson is Cynthia Inda. She's with county council.

[00:06:42]and then various HR management representatives, SSH, CA, sheriff's department, they also have participation that reflects the various agencies within the county.

[00:06:57]>> Okay, thank you Veronica for that. If you noticed that on the prior slide that the county team was cloaked in darkness, that was not accidental because we're the light side, they're the dark side, but that's the group that we're bargaining with at the table. So, thank you, Tim. So, I'm going to take a quick look back. Some of you have seen some of the county's financial presentation before, but I'll quickly hit some highlights and highlight what you have been hearing and dealing with in the workplace for the last 15 16 months. Uh this next slide shows three years of adopted budget and that's from left to center and then you have two columns that show the strategic financial plan and also a gap in the 2627 year a 31 million gap and then 146 million gap in the next fiscal year. That's what the county has been pedalling through your department heads over the last 15 16 months. But for those of you who understand the strategic financial plan, that is a selfcreated crisis by the county CEO and CFO. And we'll get into a little bit more detail on that later.

[00:08:20]The other thing the county anchored their financial presentation with was talking about their county budget action plan. And again, this is part of what you've been hearing for the last year.

[00:08:35]The strategic financial plan, which again is falsely created, but it creates a need for constriction. And you've been hearing about a hiring and discretionary spending freeze all year long, but we know that throughout 2025, the county has hired nearly 700 OCA positions. So, that doesn't sound like a freeze to me.

[00:09:00]They also said they want to priorit prioritize mandated programs.

[00:09:06]Okay, fine. If they're mandated, they've also implemented departmental cost reductions. That's what you're feeling now. But a lot of those cost reductions come in the form of deleted positions.

[00:09:19]That last little bullet there, and we're going to talk more about this as we get through this deck. They also talked about their challenges and risks. None of this is new information, right? We know that the amount of general purpose revenue in the county of Orange is limited based on how the funding is structured. We all know what HR1 is, right? The big bad bill that does stand to reduce some federal funding for certain programs. We'll be monitoring that.

[00:09:53]The state budget, when they gave us their presentation, the state budget was not known. The May revise has now been issues and there there was no real changes from the January release. And then the last thing about election potential impacts on the economy, housing market, they try to characterize it as stagnant. This county is always has always and is always planning for the next recession. So folks, nothing new here.

[00:10:25]Okay. Now, anytime we get a financial presentation from the county, that's the employer trying to frame up their narrative and their foundation from which they will be making negotiations, proposals before we do our proposals.

[00:10:43]Like today, we gave them our rebuttal on May the 13th. Then I want to spend a little bit of time talking about that because every negotiation cycle we will do our own financial rebuttal. And I'm here to tell you over the last decade, every single fact, every single figure that we present to the county has never been challenged. And I just want to underscore that. We use a third-party forensic accounting firm called Harvey M. Rose. And the following few slides are facts. They are facts that are published in public documents that the county is required to publish. And we don't just make this up. We present it in a very straightforward way. And we also present these facts to the board of supervisors. We will not rely on any bit of staff level translation.

[00:11:46]We spoke these facts directly to the board of supervisors.

[00:11:51]Okay. Number one, the county projects that by June of 2026, its general fund reserves will be 204 million greater than their own reserve target. But that's not all because there's other places where they can hide money. Since 2019, the county reserves have increased by 252 million. So, let's show how that funding gap and that strategic financial plan when I said it was county created that the gap was created. Here's one reason why the county has consistently underestimated generalpurpose revenues ranging from 5 million in one fiscal year to 96 million. And so this isn't just conservative budgeting. This is the county intentionally creating a gap, a crisis, a need for cuts.

[00:12:57]Secondly, and this is one of my favorites, the combined fund balance of only four internal service funds, which is essentially reserves for workers comp, reserves for unemployment, reserves for transportation and it. Look at this number. As of June of 2025, they had $95 million in excess from what general accounting principles would call for a reserve level. This is another way above and beyond the county's reserve policy to hide money.

[00:13:36]Here's another one of my favorites, right? capital projects because one of the things that you hear from your CEO is we got to hold money back for capital projects. We we've got to prioritize money for it, for expansions, a new jail, and yes, we got to take care of our people, but we got competing priorities here. In fiscal year 2223, the capital money set aside went undersspent by $233 million. And in fiscal 2324, it went underspent $129 million. Damn, you got the money. It's just sitting there. You're just not spending it. And then look at that final figure, right? As of June of 2025, the county was sitting on almost $500 million in their capital expenditure account just waiting to be spent. So, you don't have to tell us that you've got competing priorities with labor because you got the money just sitting right there.

[00:14:51]Aside from the budget and the accounting numbers, we also look at the market. And we did this in 2023. We've done it again. We've shown both the county and the board of supervisors what the market looks like. Let your eyes go from Ventura County 10 a.5% over three years.

[00:15:10]LA County 7% over three plus lump sums.

[00:15:14]San Diego 10 and a half over three plus lump sums. Santa Barbara 10% over three and Riverside 13% over three mirroring what we did between 2023 and 2026.

[00:15:31]The other thing that we traditionally do is we will compare a basket of benchmark classifications against the top 10 other top nine counties across the state. We've done this for 50 years so that we're consistently measuring the same set of benchmarks every time we go into negotiations. This year, Orange County is 8.32% lower than the statewide mean. Even with our last contract was which was 13% over 3 years, we still lost ground because in 2023 that number was 6.84% lower than the mean. But that's not all, right? You guys know that we are all fighting inflation. And what this CPI chart shows that in late 2025 and then into the beginning of 2026, we saw it going in the right direction where it dipped down under 3% in February to 2.9%.

[00:16:41]But what happened, right, it's ticking back up in March and and April and every news cycle that you hear, it's all about affordability. It's all about kitchen table issues like food and gasoline and housing. So again, we put that right in front of the county's face.

[00:17:04]Now, Veronica mentioned vacancies. You you might remember in 2023, we we made a hard push on the excess vacancies that the county was running in our six bargaining units. And here's where we're at today.

[00:17:21]The budgeted vacancy rate for all of OCA is 8.4%.

[00:17:27]The actual is 10.7.

[00:17:31]That's what we're running today. Now, you may say, okay, 2.3, that's not bad, but that's not all what you're feeling in the workplace. And I want to show you my absolute favorite slide here because when we met with the county and they were patting themselves on the back for how many how many positions they deleted.

[00:17:55]So current vacancies without deletions 10.7 from the other slide. When you fold in the deleted positions over the last three years, the county has deleted 887 positions. So when you fold that into the vacancy rate, now you're talking about an actual vacancy rate of 18.9.

[00:18:23]Folks, that's what you're feeling in the workplace. Because when nearly one in five positions is gone, clients don't go away, work doesn't go away, the bosses don't go away, the demands don't go away. It just means they want you to work harder for what they're paying you. So the excess vacancies and deletions, the county is saving $82 million a year just on salary.

[00:18:56]34 million when you fold in salaries and benefits. So, I've showed you a few areas where the money is. I've showed you where the county is already saving money on your backs on the backs of our members. So, that's the level of rebuttal. And I'll close the loop by saying never, not once has the county challenged one of our facts, one of our statistics, one of our impact numbers, because that's what you're feeling every day. Yes, the economics are the most important thing out of our survey, but another substantial part that came out of our survey was flexibility. And now Veronica is going to walk through not only some comments from the survey but then fold that right into the some of the details of our initial proposal. So lead spokesperson I'm handing it right back to you.

[00:19:57]>> Thank you CB. You'll see a couple quotes of regarding flexibility on the screen.

[00:20:02]So telecommuting teleworking that came through loud and clear in the survey. It's something that everyone in the department, this particular person's department, but truly in the county wants back. We we had some during COVID and then many departments have rolled it back. So, that's a big push that we're making. The main four themes, which we'll get into a little more detail in a minute for this year's bargaining, are wages, flexibility, addressing workloads, so vacant positions creates a higher workload, and then really just responding to inflation, whether that's through wages or other avenues, responding to those increased costs that you all are feeling. So, I'll turn it over to Tim so he can go over a little bit more of what was on our initial proposal and then we'll leave it up for questions at the end.

[00:21:01]>> Thank you, Veronica. So, yeah, so our initial proposal. So, a few things too.

[00:21:05]We're going to go through high level and I know some folks immediately are going to say, "Hey, why can't we just see the entire proposal?" A lot of that is is strategic. Having a confidential exchange between the parties can develop trust and we're able to get a good rhythm going and that always happens when we're able to kind of have the proposal stay within stay within the room. It's not about hiding anything.

[00:21:27]It's about being strategic. But if you read all of our emails, the Union Action Team videos, you will absolutely be able to track with where we are and it and not and we're going to be as as ex as as open as we can without compromising our strategic move. But certainly if you're following along with all these emails and all of our communication, you'll definitely be able to follow along with the story and have a very good idea of where we're at. So a few things first, let's go over wages and money. So we're going to talk about that. The flexibility uh artificial intelligence is a specific item because I think that touches almost everything that we do and then some other topics. Uh our proposal today it was what 26 proposals right 26 individual proposals. Some of these proposals cover every single member in the OCA union. Some cover small parts of membership, either a specialty item or something that is a specific contract provision that we've identified or members identified that doesn't necessarily apply to everyone. Um, but a total of 26 individual proposals. And remember, we have sixUS, six bargaining units in the county that are under the OCA umbrella. 26 proposals covering 10,000 people. That might sound like a lot of proposals, but really that was the negotiation team using the survey as our guiding north star. And then also just knowing that not everything was going to be able to make it. So our team went through that process and related to wages and money.

[00:22:59]We're proposing a multi-year term and the term and the money are always related. All right, I can't overemphasize that enough. We always joke about the proverbial dump truck of money, right? If the county came today with a dump truck full of money, then bargaining is going to end pretty quick and we're going to want to have a deal that lasts as long as the money lasts.

[00:23:21]But if it's a different bargaining environment and there isn't as much money, then we don't necessarily want to lock ourselves into a long term if there if the term isn't going to be good. So, we do have general wage increases for each year of our proposal. What's the number? What's the number, Tim? Again, you saw what the regional market was.

[00:23:40]You saw the inflationary pressures. We want to be able to have a defensible wage proposal that's based on empirical evidence, the the vacancy rate, other counties. But each year, just think we're around the range of sevenish, right in that range for each year. Are we going to end at that? If the county brings that dump truck full of money, then heck yeah. But we don't hear the county's response for a few weeks and we'll talk more about that. We also know that more and more of our workers are PEPA are in the PEPA retirement plan, not the classic retirement plan. So, we want to increase that match, that supplemental match that might be able to enhance newer workers retirements a little bit more. We just heard that scream off of the survey. More and more of our members are now in that new retirement. And then, as I alluded to, enhancements and specialties. We have some classifications that either there's an acute market. You saw a lot of vacancies out there. So, everyone's experiencing recruitment and retention, but some classifications within the county, it's even additionally acute and have been identified over multiple bargaining periods. So, some of those that are in there are groups that we've been taking a few bites at the apple in previous negotiation cycles and just came up a bit short. flexibility ex enhance and expand leaves, right? So, just think where you got leaves that have hour limits on them. We want to add more hours to those. We also want to add more holidays. We know the court is getting Junth. That's becoming a more uh common holiday in the public sector. And we also know that a lot of folks here celebrate their main Christmas is Christmas Eve, right? So, you can get an idea of some of the holidays that we're proposing. We know as it relates to flexibility, holidays, time off, very important stuff. Artificial intelligence, we're going to have a special side discussion with some individuals to really get deep into some of the impacts that artificial intelligence is going to have on public service with an eye towards protecting jobs and protecting the essence of what it is to be a public servant. So, we don't want technology to cheapen what it means to be a public servant. If anything, it we only want it to enhance where it can, but we want to make sure too that we protect jobs. And then some additional topics that are covered, union rights, so there are some language in ourou around the grievance procedure we want to clean up. And then we also want to address headon either through a a committee or some mandated trigger language that the the county has to do something when vacancies become really acute in particular job classifications.

[00:26:19]So between our 26 proposals, those are the kind of the broad topics that they're falling in. Uh all of them are very important and priorities to us, but we're going to hear from the county on their response herely.

[00:26:32]So let me get into some of these immediate next steps. And CBF Veronica, if I'm missing something or you got to clean something up, always help me out here. But we got a June primary election coming here next week. Six days. Oh my gosh. Hope everyone's voted. You might be thinking to yourself, what the heck does that have to do with anything? Two members of the board of supervisors are going to be on that election. And remember, the board of supervisors are the one that ultimately are the who we're negotiating with. Cynthia from county council, she's a spokesperson, but the county board of supervisors is the ultimate entity with whom we negotiate with. So, there will be impacts to the board of supervisors based on that June election that we just have to take into consideration. Also, what's not included on here is that the county CEO is going to be having their last day right around our contract expiring. So, that leadership vacuum in the county on top of a June primary election is just going to add additional uncertainty and variables to the negotiation cycle. The board of supervisors though is going to next meet on June 9th. So, our proposal number one that we just gave to the county spokespeople is going to be presented to the board of supervisors on the 9th. And at that point, we are in hopefully anticipating getting the board's going to give direction to the county team, but we also want to make sure that they hear directly from us. So, during that meeting, we're also going to have members of the OCA board of directors and a few of our workplace leaders hit public comment. It's not a mass union mobilization. Not yet. All right. We're not doing that yet. But we are going to have a subtle escalation with some of our union leadership just to drive home the message to the board that we're watching you and also you better give your team some good authority here to come back with a proposal that's going to get this process moving in the proper direction. We meet again on June 17th.

[00:28:24]So, eight days after the board gets gives their authority, the county will give a response and then all of ourus do expire June 25th. But have no fear, all terms, rights, and conditions remain in effect while we're negotiating the successor agreement. Now, I know some folks are like, gosh, we really want to get this done before expiration, but the number one goal here is to get the best deal possible for as many as possible.

[00:28:49]So if we have to take our time and doing that's absolutely something that we're going to do because it's definitely worth the wait.

[00:28:56]>> Hey Tim, what before you transition a highlight for the group why some of those close session dates are so important to the progress or the pace at which negotiations has to happen.

[00:29:12]>> Yeah, thank you CV. Sorry for for not really driving that point home. So the spokespeople for the county, they are not the decision makers. It's the elected officials. And only when the board of supervisors has their regular meeting and convene in close session are they able to get authority or direction given. So a lot of our timing is really predicated on when the board of supervisors meets. That's just the way it is. That's the only time those five individuals are together and talking about this particular topic. uh we don't just let those board of supervisors meetings occur. We are also having our individual conversations with individual members of the board. But it's really important to understand that that kind of anchor dates uh that are consistent with the county board of supervisor meetings as very important dates for our negotiations process.

[00:30:05]Is that good, CB?

[00:30:09]Excellent. All right, just a bit more and then we're getting kind of near the end. So, I know some folks might be throwing some questions in the chat.

[00:30:15]We're going to have those kind of go to a central location, but you know, building power as a union is a reminder that our biggest strength is our strength in numbers, right? So, we anticipate this negotiation session might be a little bit of a slog. It's a you see lack of CEO, there's changes at the board of supervisors level, not a lot of consistency here in the county, and a lot of tumult. So we anticipate that this might be a little bit of a slow negotiations, but we have a saying around here that then all we can do is control our position and try to be in the best position possible for the next steps. So think about bargaining as a process that has its own peaks and kind of lulls. It's an overall campaign though and that campaign is going to take place over time. Sometimes it's going to be a little bit more action-packed and sometimes it might be a little bit slow. But I'd like to think that when we gave out our bargaining survey, that was essentially the kickoff of this campaign. And then when we gave the county our opening proposal, that was a kind of a new kind of peak. And then they're going to give us their responses. And then after we do that give and take, hopefully it ultimately ends with the peak, which is negotiating a final agreement that we bring out to the membership to approve. But we have to prepare for all of these times. So that's doing those potential actions and escalations. So here's where our head's at right now. There's kind of three categories of actions that our union can take. Foundational, public, and more confrontational.

[00:31:50]Now, I want to preface this with if and when the county brings a dump truck full of money, that's the goal. So that happens at the foundational steps, awesome. If it has to be at the more public or confrontational, so be it. But the goal is to get the good deal. So right now we are doing one of those foundational. We have over 200 plus members on this call right now. So that's showing engagement information.

[00:32:16]And you better believe the county is going to know how many people came onto this meeting. Getting our union swag out, wearing our union materials, doing those literature drops, blitzing at workplaces, just getting the word out.

[00:32:28]Those seem very small and insignificant, but those build the foundation for future escalations and also create energy and buzz in the workplace that management absolutely hears. So then there's the more public ones and that's going to be coming up here not too long when we go to the county board of supervisors to do board comments, when we come out to your work site to have more meetings and talk about escalation steps. We might be writing letters to the to the newspapers and the Orange County Register and editorializing what's going on to start putting a more public pressure on the elected officials in the county. But again, if that dump truck full of money doesn't yet materialize, then we might have to be more confrontational. And that's when we might ask all of you to fill the county administrative area and go to the board of supervisors or even ask our membership to authorize a strike vote.

[00:33:22]Again, none of these things are pleasant. We're not looking forward to going to them, but we know what our members work are worth. We know the value of public service, and we are not going to accept anou that doesn't value that service.

[00:33:40]So, please stay involved, right? Work your way up as an engaged member. If you're on this right now, look at that.

[00:33:46]You're an engaged member. Once a month on the first Thursday of the month, we do have a union action team meeting.

[00:33:51]That's just a 30 minute Zoom that we just kind of do a quick update on what's going on in negotiations. Once a month we have our steward meeting virtual and in in real life here at OCA on the third Thursday we have our bargaining team members and then our OCA board of directors. But get involved and once you become an engaged member, you can work your way up that activist ladder. And then who knows, maybe in a few years, you too can be on the OCA bargaining team and you'll be looking back and thinking, it all started by me attending this meeting back in 2026.

[00:34:23]Also, if you haven't opted in, you can text the word negotiations to 9433.

[00:34:30]We use that sparingly, only when there's really big updates. So, we'll shoot text messages to your phone. Most of our updates will be done via email to the home email address. Uh so be on the lookout for this recorded meeting to be pushed out to home emails for your co-workers who maybe were unable to join today at noon or at 5:30. Our website also ocea.org you see a button county negotiations will have resources, training materials, up-to-date emails, and our YouTube channel uh also has additional training. So, if you want to go geek out on union stuff, those are some fantastic resources. And before we turn it over to some questions, comments, or emotional outbursts. For those that have been around for a while, might remember OCA's old general manager, Nick Veradino. Nick now is very active in the veterans community. Right outside OCA's building in the alley, it's called Baradino Way. as a reminder for all of us on our way into work to remember that this union was founded on some great foundational values and that we do it the Baradino way. And what Nick taught us was the more you sweat in peace, the less you'll bleed in war. So, we are preparing. We have prepared for years for this moment, this opening day of negotiations. Our workplace leaders are prepared and we will be ready if this has to be a fight. and we don't run to any fight. We'll walk to the fight, but when we're there, you better believe we're gonna fight like hell. And that's what our union does. And that's our proud tradition. As you can see, when our union so proudly occupied the top floor of the old county administrative building when they were doing a bunch of upgrades while trying to say that they had to lay off our members during the recessions. It's in our blood. We're proud to do it. We'll turn it over to some questions if we have them. And if we're unable to get your questions, you can also shoot an email to [email protected] and we can definitely get you there. So, I'll stop my share. And thanks everyone for being so patient.

[00:36:35]>> Thank you, Tim. That was that was awesome. And if you do have a comment, throw it into the chat. We're monitoring the chat. And I'll even start one because I got a a private email question. I'll go ahead and address that while any other questions are flowing in. And the email goes like this. Hey CB, I'm not part of the union action team. I'm not a steward and I'm not on the OCA board of directors. As a general member, what should I do in the workplace during this time? And Tim alluded to it in the activist ladder.

[00:37:09]first is be informed, be engaged, and make sure that you are talking with your co-workers, not on the clock, but you are sharing emails and you are keeping the buzz of negotiations going in the workplace. That's critical. And so, obviously, for those of you who have taken that next step and being here, thank you very much. But day in day out, stay informed, stay engaged. Tim had a slide earlier that talked about the foundational parts of activism and he mentioned a blitz. Tuesday, two weeks ago, we had a blitz when we were out at Can and Cass and and several other large county facilities. Just that one day, we physically communicated with 1,250 of our members in one day.

[00:38:06]That's pretty cool. And then secondly, I got to believe anecdotally that for each of those people, they talked to two or three others in the workplace. So anecdotally, I'm thinking just that one day, we touched about 2500 to 3,750 members just in one day. That's the power of energy and that's how all of you can help during this critical critical time. So Kevin, anything coming through the chat?

[00:38:43]>> And some of them are coming directly to me. So I got some I got some right now.

[00:38:48]>> So yeah, I am seeing them. I'll do my best to toggle through so I see the top question. So CB or Veronica, I'll let you guys answer it. But why do the board of soups get a 25% increase and we get peacemeal out small increases? And did we mention that to them?

[00:39:02]>> We all know the story. The board of soups are like, "We haven't had a pay increase in 20ome years." They did it to themselves. Tim and I and Veronica and Tia, we dealt it headon. We went into each of their offices and said, "You gave us a clean shot and our members know about it." And you betcha we're going to drag that right into bargaining. We did it to their face.

[00:39:31]Wasn't even a workaround. And certainly that is one part of our foundational factors that we use to to set salary proposals. I mentioned the market. I mentioned the statewide, but we certainly we also mentioned inflation, but we also folded in your 25% raise.

[00:39:54]And what you need to know, supervisors, is no one in OCA has forgot about that.

[00:39:59]So, you may have forgot about it because it's been a little bit of time, but our membership has not forgot about that one bit.

[00:40:09]>> Awesome. We go to the next one. I also want to pull a kulpa. I was looking when I made the deck of our negotiations team members. I think I omitted one of my AI subcommittee cohorts of Angelo Lugo. So Angelo Lugo is also on the negotiations team and on our Eboard. So I know he a lot of his co-workers go to him. So I want to make sure I remembered that.

[00:40:29]Another question. Does Michelle Agiri's departure affect negotiation in terms of slowing the pace progress or will it be a separate sideshow that won't impact negotiations? I can kind of jump on this one.

[00:40:41]It it will impact negotiations in that Michelle Agiri was this large almost larger than life executive, somebody who has been with the county for 30 years.

[00:40:49]The financial part has really a lot of pull, a lot of people respect her. So with that individual being gone, there's a void of who's going to step into that leadership. So to say that it won't impact negotiations wouldn't be true, but I also don't anticipate it being some massive distraction. I don't think it's going to derail it. I don't What do you think, CB?

[00:41:11]>> It would almost be a more significant factor if she was staying because she would be that gatekeeper between staff and the board. But when she's gone, they'll they'll be an interim, but it will point us back to the five individuals who ultimately are the decision makers. And we will not rely on any CEO to carry our message. That's why we've already done a first round of what we call boardwalks directly into the board offices highlighting your priorities that came from the survey highlighting Harvey MROS highlighting the 25% raise highlighting what our members need. We will never rely on any staff member to carry your voice into the board offices. Your bargaining team will do that. And the county staff bargaining team, they know that. They expect us to go around them and go right to the board of supervisors to communicate with them.

[00:42:14]>> Another question. Do we anticipate the county using the recent Garden Grove emergency to downplay their budget? If so, how will we address? Too early to tell, but we're, as you can see from a lot of our slides, we've already identified it. We've already identified multiple buckets that they can draw from that were probably budgeted for this that will have no impact on the county's overall financial health, but we haven't heard anything yet. Some of the impact might be more at the city level, but still very early, right? So, if that changes, we'll pivot immediately and be ready. What are we doing to help members who are affected by deletion of jobs, which eventually leads to involuntary reassignments? If we have also reviewed ourus which don't address the deletion of jobs and movement of new jobs within the county.

[00:43:03]That's a lot. Specifically, I know we are proposing a current provision that is really around vacancies to have a proactive plan to fill and have a hiring opportunity. Some of it though, quite frankly, is the ability to delete or dictate the work. A lot of it's been vetted and challenged and it's been ultimately upheld as a quote management rights. There is some there are some things within the purview of the county that uh there's not a lot you even can negotiate to put limits around it. But where we can, we're trying to create those boxes as best we can. What I will tell you, I was about to say your name.

[00:43:42]You said the question. I don't know if you want to be outed. Uh great question asker. when the county was patting themselves on the back with their deletions, we spent a lot of time just hitting them for how tonedeaf that was and that they need to be going the other direction.

[00:43:58]We we're feeling it everywhere. So, we are trying to find specificou provisions that try to deal with vacancies, but not specifically to answer your question to deleted positions. And if that was >> butchered, someone help me out or you can contact me. I can just if I can just jump in and add the county is huge. So, we try to stay on top of everything, but if your particular program or unit has been heavily impacted either by deleted positions or you just have a high number of vacancies, please reach out to your labor reps. We want to know about that.

[00:44:32]We want to do what we can to address it, but we don't know if no one tells us.

[00:44:37]So, if that is going on in your workplace, please email us, call us.

[00:44:41]We'll do what we can um to address that.

[00:44:45]And it is part of our talking points for bargaining as well. We don't have to wait for bargaining to be done to talk about that with the county.