Know The Facts

What City management’s press release says — and what it leaves out

On September 9th, City management issued a press release describing its final contract offer to the employees represented by AFSCME Local 2975. The numbers in it are real. But each one was chosen to look as small, or as generous, as possible.

Here is the rest of the picture, using the City’s own documents.

“About $26 a month” for health insurance

The City’s bargaining team proposes raising the employee share of insurance premiums from 7% to 10%, and management says that costs “approximately $26 per month for a full-time employee.”

That is true for employees who cover only themselves. Using the City’s own 2026 rate sheet, a three-point increase on medical and dental premiums comes to roughly:

• $27 a month for single coverage
• $55 a month for employee plus one
• $74 a month for family coverage

Most City workers cover a spouse, a partner, or children. For them, the real cost is two to three times what the release describes.

There is a second omission. The change would not take effect until January 2029 — but the $26 figure is calculated at 2026 prices. Premiums rise every year. Whatever the increase turns out to be in 2029, it will be larger than the figures above, for everyone.

Management did not do the math wrong. It selected the smallest number available and presented it as the typical one.

“COLAs are in addition to six annual step increases of 5%”

This phrasing suggests every employee receives a raise on top of the cost-of-living adjustment. That is not how the pay schedule works.

Appendix B of our contract runs Step 1 through Step 6. An employee hired at the bottom moves up five times to reach the top, not six. And then the increases stop.

Step increases go only to employees who have not yet reached the top of their range. According to the payroll data the City itself provided for costing this contract, 138 of the 244 filled positions in our bargaining unit — more than 56 percent — are already at the top step.

These are the City’s longest-serving workers. They climbed through those steps years ago, and that climb is finished. For them, a step increase is not something still to come; it is already behind them.

So for a majority of the people this offer covers, the cost-of-living adjustment is not “in addition” to anything. It is the raise, entire.

The step increases management points to are real. They are also, for most of this bargaining unit, already spent.

“A $20 million budget gap”

This is the figure management asks the public to weigh against the cost of a contract. The City’s own release explains what is inside it: “$4 million annually in operating costs and $16 million to address facility needs that have been unfunded for decades.”

So four-fifths of the number is buildings.

The City’s August 20th work session put the facilities figure in detail — about $14.3 million a year in debt service on new construction, plus $2 million in lease costs. That is deferred construction, not wages. Settling a contract would not change it by a dollar.

When management attaches the full $20 million to these negotiations, it is counting deferred construction against the people who provide drinking water, run the library, and maintain the parks.

The gap is a General Fund problem. Most of our work is not paid for out of it.

The shortfall the City describes is specific. It lives in the discretionary, property-tax-supported General Fund — money capped by Measure 50 and growing about 3% a year. The City’s own budget states plainly that enterprise and special revenue funds receive no property tax support and run on their own dedicated revenue.

Now look at where our members actually work.

Public Works is the largest part of this bargaining unit — 98 positions, roughly 40% of our members. Here is what the City’s own adopted budget says about how much of Public Works sits in the General Fund: it is comprised of “less than one (1) full-time equivalent Public Works employee (0.6 FTE).”

Six tenths of one position. Water and wastewater operators, street maintenance crews, engineering staff, fleet and facilities — paid by utility rates, street funds, and the people who use those services. Not by the property taxes that are in deficit.

The Library and Parks & Recreation are General Fund departments, but their money is dedicated too. The City’s budget describes the Library’s dedicated revenue as local option levy taxes and Benton County Library Service District taxes. Parks & Recreation runs substantially on that same voter-approved levy, which is split roughly 52% to the Library and 48% to Parks — money Corvallis residents approved for those specific services. It is not the discretionary revenue the gap is measured in.

Development Services and building inspection run largely on permit fees. Transit, parking and the airport each run on their own revenue.

We are not claiming a contract costs the General Fund nothing. It costs it something — through the departments that genuinely sit there, and through the General Fund’s share of internal services allocated across every fund the City runs. But when management sets a $20 million General Fund gap beside this contract, it is setting it beside a workforce that, by the City’s own accounting, is largely paid from somewhere else.

What else the City’s own documents show

The City settled a contract this year without the gap growing. When the firefighters’ agreement was reached, it added roughly $5.3 million in cost. Over the same period the City adopted a five-year schedule of increases to its existing public safety fee, projected to raise about $10.2 million. The forecast gap for the coming biennium did not rise. It fell, from $13.0 million in the City’s March forecast to $8.1 million.

There is a demonstrated method here for funding a settled contract without treating it as a threat to core services. The City used it a few months ago.

The City budgets for positions it does not fill, and it knows what that produces. Every position is budgeted at full cost whether or not anyone holds it. The City reports the result to its own Budget Commission every quarter. At the close of the last fiscal year it had budgeted 543.81 full-time-equivalent positions and filled 483.41 — leaving 60.4 positions vacant, 11.1% of the entire workforce. Public Works alone carried 15.65 vacant positions.

The Budget Commission stated the consequence in its own summary of where year-end fund balance comes from: “Expenditure Savings are predominately generated by turnover, or vacancies.”

It also put a number on it. From the City’s own table of General Fund expenditure savings, presented to the Budget Commission in August 2026:

Four years running, never varying by more than a quarter of a million dollars. That is not a windfall. It is a budget line the City does not spend, every year, by design.

Across the whole General Fund the pattern is larger still. These are the City’s audited budget-to-actual figures for all General Fund spending — personnel, and everything else:

Seven years running. Not once under $2.8 million, and $49.2 million in total — money the City budgeted to spend on running the city and did not spend. City financial policy also directs that revenues subject to fluctuation be estimated conservatively and expenditures liberally. Budget cautiously, leave positions unfilled, and the shortfall on paper comes out larger than the shortfall in practice.

The General Fund ends every year well above what the City budgeted. From the City’s own audited financial reports:

Five years running, the City has budgeted for a smaller reserve than it ended up with — and the gap between the two has widened, not closed. The reserve now stands at $34.4 million.

The pattern has not stopped. The City’s own report for the fiscal year that ended this June projects the General Fund finishing the current two-year budget at $22.5 million, against $18.2 million budgeted, with spending at 95.5% of budget. The City published that projection this summer, while telling the public it faces a budget gap. We are not suggesting the City pay ongoing wages out of one-time balances — that is not how a budget works. The point is narrower and harder to answer: the fund the gap is measured in has been under-forecast every year, by a margin that keeps growing.

Outside analysts do not share the alarm. On June 8, 2026 — three months ago, and while the City was already forecasting this shortfall — Moody’s upgraded the City of Corvallis from Aa2 to Aa1. It was the first increase in nearly a decade; the City had held Aa2 since 2017.

Moody’s cited a “robust financial position and growing local economy,” the City’s relatively low debt, and a diverse revenue mix. On how the City manages costs, Moody’s observed that it “has annually increased fees in line with expenditures.”

The City’s own headline on the announcement read: “Moody’s upgrades City’s bond rating, citing ‘prudent budget management.’” Its Finance Director called the upgrade “a huge vote of confidence in the direction that Corvallis is headed as a government organization.”

That was June. The press release describing a budget gap that will “impact core services as early as 2027” came in September.

What the release did not mention

The September press releases describing these negotiations do not mention that our bargaining team put a bargaining proposal on the table on July 20th, followed by a mediation package on August 14th, or that management rejected both. A reader would have no way of knowing our proposals existed at all.

They also say nothing about what we have given up to reach a settlement without escalating. Over eight months at the table, our side has:

• Withdrawn proposals entirely — on telework, on downtown parking, on probationary periods, and on regular standing labor-management meetings.
• Accepted the City’s existing contract language on layoff and bumping rights, dropping our own proposal on that article.
• Lowered our wage proposal more than once, most recently in the offer filed with the state.
• Cut our step request from a full restructured range down to a single additional step.
• Dropped longevity pay entirely — the issue that brought our members to City Council in June — and proposed in its place a deferred compensation contribution that management itself had put forward in May, before withdrawing it.

Both the July 20th proposal and the September 8th final offer are filed documents. The distance between them is a matter of record, not a matter of our description.

Every one of those moves was made to close the gap rather than widen it. None of them appears in anything the City has published about these negotiations.

Nor is this the first time City workers have been asked to absorb a budget problem.

We have paid for a budget gap before

The City has faced a budget shortfall before, and it has published what City employees did about it. From the City’s own budget FAQ, under the heading “How are City employees contributing to the City’s financial situation?”:

• AFSCME members took two furlough days under a one-year contract in FY 2011-12.
• AFSCME and exempt staff moved to a single lower-cost, high-deductible health plan in January 2015.
• Firefighters gave up a contractually negotiated cost-of-living adjustment.
• Some employees took voluntary leave without pay.
• And, in the City’s words: “A number of currently vacant positions continue to be held open, with other employees taking on more work to cover the vacancies.”

We are not raising this to reopen old contracts. We are raising it because the City is again describing a budget problem alongside a negotiation with this union — and because the record shows what City workers already did the last time it did.

Where these numbers come from

Every figure above is drawn from documents the City of Corvallis has published: its September 2026 press releases, its budget gap pages, its 2026 employee insurance rate sheet, its adopted budget documents, and materials presented to the Budget Commission and City Council. The step figures come from the payroll data the City’s Finance Director supplied to cost this contract. We have not asked anyone to take our word for any of it.

The members of Local 2975 are City of Corvallis employees. We are not arguing against our city. We are asking the people who negotiate on its behalf to bargain in good faith with the workers who keep it running.

If you would like to see the underlying documents, email AFSCME2975@gmail.com and we will point you to them.