What a couple of months:

The staff of the HPOU have been very busy over the last few months.  March always seems to be busy with world’s largest Rodeo and all of the officers that work this event. Then we rolled right into the annual Assist the Officer Gala.  Once again, the gala was a huge success thanks to Tim Whitaker, Lisa Marino, Gabriella Gregory, and the rest of our HPOU staff.

If you have not attended an ATO Gala, you are missing out.  It is such a great time, and we get to honor those who exhibit the best of what the Houston Police Department represents. For those who have been please know that we are selling next years tickets at last years prices… just a shameless plug for a great event.

As we rolled into April we received the great news about our fight against proposition B. I am very proud to say that the HPOU was on the right side of the Proposition B fight, and it was a great win for this organization as well as the citizens of Houston.  This was a long battle that cost almost one million dollars but was necessary for our future bargaining ability.  We have always held that the firefighters deserve a raise, just not one tied to our contract.  I cannot help but mention that we were there when the mayor offered them 9.5% and later at a second round of mediation 307 million dollars to split how they wanted. But this seemed more about the fight than it ever did the money.

I want to give a lot of credit for this to Joe Gamaldi, Ray Hunt, Aaron Suder, and Kelly Sandhill for all of their hard work on this case.  This is truly a game changer for Houston and the HPOU.  The ramifications from prop B would have been disastrous for the future of the city as well as any of our future contracts.

And finally, as most of you have seen, we have been very active in Austin.  Ray along with our lobbying group have been at the forefront of the activity.  Most do not understand the power that we hold in Austin.  Much of this related to our honest and open conversations with those in power, along with our healthy Political Action Committee (PAC) fund. If you don’t give to PAC please start, it is extremely important for the future of this organization and our future benefits.