Weeks after members of Akron’s police union and non-union City of Akron employees received retroactive and future pay raises, more than 500 additional city employees are getting pay bumps.
Akron City Council voted on Monday evening to approve the financial terms in the city’s new collective bargaining agreements with the unions representing Akron firefighters and many of the city’s “white collar” workers.
The agreements with the Akron Fire Fighters Association Local 330 (AFA) and the Civil Service Personnel Association means their members will receive retroactive 5% raises going back to the beginning of 2025 and additional 4.5% raises in 2026 and 2027. The previous collective bargaining agreements for both unions — covering 2022, 2023, and 2024 — gave them annual 4%, 4%, and 3% raises.
While the city and the firefighters’ union agreed on the rates of raises, City of Akron attorney Brian Angeloni told a City Council committee on Monday afternoon that they still have some “very small” disagreements to work through before the contract is signed.
“There is really not that much of a disagreement remaining,” Angeloni said — the legislation approved by City Council is intended to pay their retroactive raises immediately. All but newly sworn in council member Fran Wilson, who represents Ward 1, voted to approve the raises (Wilson abstained, saying the legislation — with 240 pages of contractual terms — wasn’t provided soon enough for them to fully process it).
The AFA represents 352 members as of this fall — every uniformed firefighter other than the department’s chief and deputy chiefs — while the CSPA currently represents 240 employees in 127 job classifications (CSPA’s president Dan Sladek tells Signal Akron that not all job classifications are filled.
The CPSA doesn’t represent certain full-time city employees, including those in the mayor’s office, law department, human resources and certain other departments whose work has a “confidential” nature to it. Those non-unionized workers received a 3% retroactive raise for 2025 and an additional 2.25% raise in 2026.
The annual wage increases for the two unions are the same percentages given to the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge #7, the union representing Akron police officers,last month, although the firefighters and the civil service union members won’t receive the $4,000 union contract signing bonus given to every uniformed police officer. Members of all three unions will pay slightly higher health insurance premiums compared to their previous contracts.
The significant raises in the three collective bargaining agreements finalized this fall, and the legislation for slightly smaller raises for non-unionized city employees, were enacted months after City of Akron Director of Finance Steve Fricker told City Council that the police union contract raises alone would mean the city “would be facing fiscal caution by 2027 with less than 30 days cash on hand and, by 2029, would need to cut between 100-180 city jobs.”
In an interview last month, Akron Mayor Shammas Malik told Signal Akron that staffing and city services are being examined ahead of the city’s operating budget proposal in March. Income tax is down 2% this year, Malik said, and his office is considering options like keeping some current job vacancies unfilled, cutting the least-essential costs, and “looking at places where there’s more revenue that can be gathered.”
“I see a lot of that coming to a head in the 2026 operating budget, really working with council to figure out what that picture is,” Malik said last month. “Because we can get through a year, we can get through two years, but we can’t operate indefinitely like this at the current staffing levels with these wage increases and the core services and maintain our fiscal reserves.”
