Public Employee Press

DC 37 financial picture improved in 2002

By MARK ROSENTHAL
Treasurer, District Council 37

I am happy to report that our union concluded 2002 with a surplus of more than $3 million. We are doing an effective job of controlling spending, which has enabled us to allocate $1 million this year to battle layoffs and fight for a contract.

Institutions like DC 37 frequently run deficits, which is OK as long as you’re not on the rocky road to depleting your reserves — as this union was in the late 1990s. We now have $11 million in reserves. I view one of my responsibilities as keeping our more than 120,000 members and 25,000 retiree members up-to-date about DC 37’s fiscal health. Of course, we publish an annual audit (PEP, September 2003), but it’s a dry and technical document. In this column, I want to inform you about our financial condition in everyday language.

Our operating budget in 2002 was just over $31.8 million. Income was roughly $35 million. The chart at right shows how DC 37 uses your dues money. Between 2001 and 2002, the operating budget actually dropped by 1.4 percent. Ironically, our expenses actually went down a bit after we were blown out of our building by the 9/11 terrorist attacks. We received insurance payments to help defray the cost of providing membership services at temporary offices.

Good fiscal management and good fortune enabled us to end 2002 with a surplus. Basically, three factors account for this:

• We saved over $700,000 in 2002 in unpaid liabilities for former officers and officials involved in the disgraceful corruption of the late 1990s.
  I am proud that I played a central role in exposing the financial fraud and contract vote stealing that former leaders perpetrated on the union.
  Because the people implicated either were convicted or admitted their crimes, the union no longer had an obligation to cover their severance and deferred compensation. Therefore, we kept the money.
• In 2002, we received more than $1 million for insurance claims to cover 9/11 damage to our headquarters at 125 Barclay St.
  Our building-wide cleanup was costly, and flooding destroyed machinery in our basement print shop. We used part of the insurance payment to improve communications with members by modernizing our print shop and mailroom.
• We received $300,000 in New York State 9/11 business recovery grants.
  Believe it or not, DC 37 was identified in a New York Times article as the top recipient. That was thanks to the expertise of our accounting and real estate staffers, who proved to be more adept at maneuvering through the state’s bureaucratic maze than the money managers of the downtown financial institutions.
  
  As a union representing public sector employees, perhaps we had a comparative advantage based on our awareness of how government works!