or the second time in as many rounds of bargaining the PBA contract is going to binding arbitration before the state Public Employment Relations Board (PERB). We would have preferred to sit down with the city for honest and open negotiations to settle our contract, but Mayor Bloomberg and his labor commissioner just weren’t interested. They refused to make a single offer that wasn’t directly tied to the horrendous DC-37 agreement or didn’t require us to pay for any further increases out of our own pockets with givebacks or work extensions.

So it’s the city’s stalling tactics and lack of interest in honest negotiations that have driven us back to PERB. Once again the city’s negotiators tried to delay the process by stalling on dates, but the PERB saw through that ploy and ordered that the proceedings be convened.

Hearings before the full PERB panel were scheduled for Nov. 16, 19, 22, and 30 and Dec. 3, 7, 9, 13 and, if necessary, 14 and 16. The three-member PERB panel includes veteran arbitrator Eric Schmertz as the neutral party, Jay Waks of the Kay Scholer law firm for the PBA and Carol O’Blenes for the city.

PERB uses two primary criteria to decide the merits of a case: comparability and ability to pay.

Our comparability argument is very strong. By any standard, New York City police officers earn much less than the average big-city police officer, particularly when cost of living is considered. If you compare us by department size, population served, budget or any other yardstick you choose, we don’t earn what we should. We’re paid significantly below average and more than 55% less than the nation’s highest-paid cops.

The ability-to-pay argument is more challenging for us because the city’s budget is so complex. We believe the city can pay much more than it says it can and manipulates the budget to suit its own ends.

For example, if the city wants to show an impending major shortfall in a future budget, all it has to do is make very pessimistic assumptions about tax and Wall Street revenues and, presto, there’s a budget crisis. We’ve grown accustomed to hearing about huge budget gaps in the “out-years” only to find that those gaps don’t materialize after the final accounting. In fact, this year, after crying poverty, the city finds itself with well over a billion-dollar surplus.

And then there’s the fairness argument. When the city was flush with money, it didn’t pay us. In the heyday of the 90’s when city treasury was rolling in dough, the city’s arbitration panel gave us two years of zeroes in a contract decision that helped push our pay way below that of other professional police departments.

So once again the PBA has assembled its case, complete with authoritative witnesses and expert testimony to present before the PERB panel. That case, combined with the much-publicized picketing and public information campaign we started in July, makes us hopeful that the panel will see the injustice of our pay scale and take immediate steps to correct it.