Firefighters union tallying up member votes to see if they will accept City offer

The union is still trying to tally up votes from firefighters to see if they’ll send the issue to the polls this Saturday or accept the City’s latest offer that would cost the average El Pasoan an extra $10 for three years.

“The city actually came and offered us a third proposal and we presented it to the members,” said Joe Tellez, president of the firefighters union.

He said he’s not sure whether the union will have a vote tallied in time on the City’s latest labor proposal prior to Saturday’s election day.

“With the insurance still attached to it, that’s problematic,” Tellez said. “The guys really haven’t said much. We did informational sessions and then we left it up for them to vote on it.”

With Tellez saying firefighters are unlikely to accept the City’s latest offer, even if a vote can be tallied on time, everything appears to now point to voters deciding on election day.

Asked for his feeling on how that vote could turn out, Tellez pointed to the higher-than-usual early voting numbers, which exceeded 20,000.

“in 2011, there was a municipal election without a mayoral race and in that a little less than 17,000 votes were cast for the whole election — 7,000 of those were in early voting. We’ve almost tripled that output in this election,” Tellez said.

Tellez is confident the majority of those votes are for firefighters.

“We asked all 800 of our members to bring 10 people to the polls and it looks like they were able to accomplish that,” Tellez said.