California Highway Patrol officers are taking a pay cut along with the rest of the state’s workforce despite special protections that were in their contract.

Highway Patrol officers’ base pay will be reduced by 4.62%, the equivalent of one day of work per month, under the agreement the California Association of Highway Patrolmen reached with Gov. Gavin Newsom’s bargaining team.

In exchange, officers will receive 9 hours of flexible time off under a personal leave program. The state Human Resources Department posted the agreement online Wednesday.

The officers’ most recent contract included a provision that protected them from furloughs or mandatory leave programs through June 2021. That provision was struck from their contract in the legislation used to pass this year’s budget.

Furlough protections were put into most of the state’s union contracts after the furloughs and personal leave programs of the Great Recession, which largely spared CHP officers and firefighters. The state has been removing them during contract negotiations in recent years, and the CHP protections were the last ones remaining.

Newsom mandated across-the-board pay cuts for state workers on May 14 and the Legislature backed his plan to help close a projected $54 billion budget deficit. All of the state’s unions, except for one representing a small group of HVAC workers, reached pay-cut agreements by a July 1 deadline.

The agreements designate base pay cuts of 9.23% for most state workers, the equivalent of two days of work per month, and most workers are receiving 16 hours of leave per month to use at their discretion, even in future years.

Carrie Lane, the California Association of Highway Patrolmen’s chief executive officer, said the state likely would have insisted on a twice-as-deep pay cut starting in 2021 had the union fought over the furlough protection.

The officers were able to take a base pay cut equivalent to one day of work instead of two — the standard for most state workers — for a different reason related to a quirk of their retirement health care contributions.

Despite the smaller hit to their base pay, the officers’ take-home pay will be reduced by about 5.6 percent, which is in the range of other groups of workers. The state’s savings from all of the pay-cut agreements are within a few tenths of a percentage point of 9%.

The state is softening the blow of the cuts for all workers by suspending workers’ retirement health care contributions, which for most are between 2% and 4% of pay.

The officers were the first group of state workers to start contributing to the retirement health care trust fund in 2009, said Lane.

Under their original agreement, the state withheld portions of officers’ raises and contributed that money to the fund directly. That arrangement continues.

The state later changed the way it manages the contributions. Now it deducts them from workers’ paychecks.

So while most workers are taking a 9.23% pay cut and the state is returning 2% to 4% of their pay, the officers are taking a 4.62% pay cut and the state is suspending the contributions it makes to the fund on their behalf.

As a result, the state is counting those contributions — 3.4% for officers — toward the 9.23 percent savings the state sought from all workers.

The state is also suspending a uniform allowance and a uniform cleaning allowances that it normally pays officers. That saves another 1%. Together, the reductions amount to the roughly 9% the state sought from every group of workers. The officers received eight hours of leave for the day’s reduction in pay and a ninth hour for the uniform allowances.

The agreement includes provisions for the state to start deducting officers’ retirement health care contributions the same way they do for other workers in the future.

This story was originally published July 9, 2020 at 6:00 AM with the headline "State cuts pay for California Highway Patrol officers despite contract protections."