It was a cold day when I went out the city council meeting in Middletown. Mark, the staff union VP, had got a call from one of the AFSCME guys in Columbus. One of the city councillors was introducing a resolution calling upon the state legislature to strip collective bargaining rights from public employees. Mark couldn't go, but a group of us from the GEO went to show solidarity. This was December of 2010, so I half expected that there would be a mob of tea-partiers there to greet us. Dear God was I wrong.
The resolution was brought by Joshua Laubach, a twenty-something teabagger on the city council, who placed blame for Middletown's woes on city cops and firefighters:
The Butler County burg of 51,000 has seen its municipal revenue slip as the poor economy saps income taxes, its largest revenue source. The money it gets from the state - 15 percent of its budget - is in peril as state leaders look to balance their own budget. Amid all this, Middletown's labor costs continue their upward climb at the rate of 4 percent a year.A rookie city councilman, Joshua Laubach, has identified a culprit: state laws that allow municipal unions to negotiate on wages and benefits and, in the case of public-safety workers, bring in arbitrators to resolve impasses.