EDITORIAL: High court moves fast to quash awful pro-union ruling

The Nevada Supreme Court’s absurdly large caseload usually delays rulings at least a year, sometimes more. But justices haven’t used the court’s backlog as an excuse for unresponsiveness. When an unusually urgent appeal is filed, the court will move it to the front of line to resolve the matter as quickly as possible.

Few cases before the court were as important to the public interest as a dispute between the city of Reno and its firefighter union. Not only did the court make the right decision in issuing an expedited ruling — no small feat for justices who sometimes put in 16- to 18-hour days — but it also reached a just ruling in protecting taxpayers from further pilfering by the public sector.

On Wednesday, a unanimous court invalidated an injunction that prevented the city from laying off 32 firefighters. Federal funding for the positions had run out and Reno, saddled with huge debts, needed to cut payroll to be able to pay all its bills. And so, earlier this year, the city exercised its last option against a collective bargaining process that overwhelmingly favors government unions: pink slips that would lead to the closure of three fire stations and the decommissioning of a rescue truck.

The union had no legal basis to challenge the layoffs — under the state’s collective bargaining laws, management’s “right to reduce in force or lay off any employee because of lack of work or lack of money” is not subject to negotiation. But the union sued, arguing that a lengthy administrative review, culminating with arbitration, was required to determine that the city lacked the funds to support the positions. And this summer, Washoe County District Judge Lidia Stiglich ignored the plain language of the law and sided with the union, granting an injunction preventing the layoffs.

The city was forced to continue paying firefighters it couldn’t afford. And the union didn’t bother initiating the administrative review it said was required. The city appealed to the Supreme Court in the fall, and Southern Nevada local governments filed a brief in support

“The weighing of the various needs of a city or county cannot be second-guessed by a judiciary, which is provided no standards by which to judge those competing needs,” the brief said.

Indeed, if the Supreme Court had upheld the injunction, any union could challenge layoffs by arguing that its members — and their over-market salaries — are more important than any other government expenditure. Any union could argue, as the Reno firefighters union did, that local governments cannot claim a lack of money if they spend that money on anything else. An operating fund would have to be overdrawn before a government could initiate layoffs.

Management’s ability to lay off workers is the only check against unions’ ever-rising salary demands. Unions know that if they ask for too much money, they boost the chance that governments will eliminate jobs to pay for compensation increases. The firefighters’ case threatened to erase that check at a time when local government revenues are still recovering from the Great Recession.

But the Supreme Court didn’t buy any of it. “The reduction in force due to lack of funds is excluded from mandatory bargaining and reserved to the local government employer without negotiation by law,” the ruling said.

Bravo to the court for recognizing the urgency of this case — and the incredibly awful reading of the law by Judge Stiglich.