By Joseph A. Curtatone

(The opinions and views expressed in the commentaries of The Somerville News belong solely to the authors of those commentaries and do not reflect the views or opinions of The Somerville News, its staff or publishers.)

Back in the days when I was a full-time attorney – and had to handle the occasional civil suit or divorce – I used to advise my clients to ask two questions about potential settlements. The questions were “What do you want?” and “What can you live with?” The recently concluded eight-year deal between the City and its firefighters represents a compromise for both sides – and because we compromised, each side got something it could live with.

For the City, the new agreement means we don’t have to find a way to come up with a $4.3 million appropriation in the current fiscal year in order to fund retroactive wage increases for the firefighters, who had been without a contract since 2007. Instead, we’ll have to come up with a $3.3 million this year and approximately half a million next year. That’s still a major undertaking, but we won’t have to lay off workers and cut back on services in order to do it.

It also means that we get three more guaranteed years of predictable and manageable wage increases (through FY2015).

On the other side of the ledger, the firefighters get a series of annual increases that most workers in either the public or private sectors would be very happy to have – especially in an era of low inflation and economic recession.

For both sides, the settlement we reached last week means the end of a long collective bargaining struggle that has included negotiation, special arbitration and lawsuits. It’s a relief for all of us to move on.

Emotions run high in long disputes like this one, but nobody should hold it against union leadership that they pushed for the best possible deal for their members – or hold it against the City that it pursued the best possible deal for its taxpayers. In fact, once it was clear that the recent arbitration award from the state’s Joint Labor Management Committee carried a price tag that would require the city to cut staffing and services to finance the deal, it was the firefighters who stepped up, and approached the City with an offer to reopen negotiations. Since state law required that I support the JLMC award and submit an appropriation to pay for it, we should all be grateful that the union extended that offer.

By the time the general public began to understand and protest the layoffs and service cuts associated with fully funding the JLMC award, the firefighters and the City’s negotiating team were already back at the table and hard at work on a compromise settlement.

No one is happier than I am that we won’t have to shutter our two police substations, the new SFD Rescue Unit or the West Branch Library in order to pay a retroactive compensation agreement. And to be fair, no one in the firefighters union wanted to see those things happen, either.

So now we can look forward to the FY2013 budget that we will submit to the Board of Aldermen later this spring. The way ahead won’t be easy: we still have difficult choices before us. The good (or at least not-so-bad) news is that the Patrick Administration has just announced that it is level-funding non-education local aid and, by entering the state’s Group Insurance Commission health plans, we’ve been able to roll back the rate of growth in our health insurance expenditures. But many of our other costs have continued to rise, and we can’t assume the new fiscal year will be any easier than the last.

I can’t guarantee that other factors won’t force us to contemplate future service cuts or layoffs. But I can guarantee that they won’t happen as a result of this settlement.

Oh, and one more thing. I am well aware that, at several points in this opinion piece, I have violated the grammatical rule that says you’re not supposed to end a sentence with a preposition. But I also know that, in this context, I don’t care. Just think of it as another compromise – a compromise we can all live with.