The Data Gap at the Bargaining Table: Why Municipalities Are Negotiating Public Safety Contracts in the Dark

Collective bargaining with public safety unions is one of the highest-stakes financial decisions a municipality makes. Police and fire compensation typically represents the single largest line item in a city or town's budget, in some communities, accounting for as much as three-quarters of total expenditures. 

The outcome of a single negotiation cycle can shape a municipality's fiscal trajectory for years, affect its ability to recruit and retain officers and firefighters in an increasingly competitive market, and determine whether taxpayers feel their dollars are being spent responsibly.

And yet, for all its significance, there's a fundamental imbalance built into the process: municipal leaders consistently go into negotiations with far less compensation data than the unions sitting across the table.

How the Asymmetry Works

Public safety unions — the Fraternal Order of Police, the International Association of Firefighters, and their local affiliates, operate within well-resourced national and state networks. These organizations maintain dedicated research staff, compile salary and benefits data across municipalities, and share negotiation strategies and settlement outcomes with local chapters. 

Roughly two-thirds of American police officers are members of a labor union, and 41 states plus the District of Columbia permit or require municipalities to bargain collectively with police unions. When a local union sits down at the bargaining table, it typically arrives armed with detailed comparisons of what neighboring communities pay, what recent settlements looked like regionally, and where the leverage points are.

Municipal leaders, by contrast, negotiate largely in isolation. A town administrator, city manager, or mayor preparing for negotiations is typically left to cobble together compensation data through manual, time-consuming methods: calling colleagues in neighboring municipalities, compiling information into spreadsheets, commissioning studies from labor attorneys, or relying on salary surveys that may be outdated by the time negotiations begin. 

In many smaller communities, there may not even be a dedicated HR director, the town administrator handles the entire process alongside every other responsibility of running a municipality.

The challenge is compounded by a dynamic unique to municipal bargaining: most towns and cities negotiate with multiple unions — police, fire, DPW, clerical — on staggered multi-year cycles. This means a municipality may be approaching negotiations with at least one union every year, each time needing current, comparable data that's difficult and expensive to assemble from scratch.

The Competitive Pressure Is Real — and Growing

The data gap matters even more in today's environment. According to a 2024 survey by the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP), over 70% of law enforcement agencies reported that recruitment has become more difficult compared to five years ago. On average, agencies are operating at just 91% of authorized staffing levels, a nearly 10% deficit. And 65% of agencies reported having to reduce services or eliminate specialized units due to staffing shortages, up dramatically from just 25% in 2019.

This means municipalities are simultaneously under pressure to offer competitive compensation to attract and retain public safety personnel and to be fiscally responsible to taxpayers. Striking that balance requires knowing, precisely and in real time, what comparable communities are paying. Without that data, municipal leaders are left guessing: offer too little, and officers leave for the department down the road. Offer too much, and the long-term budget implications can be severe.

Research from UC Berkeley found that municipal police departments with collective bargaining spend over 10% more on salaries per employee, and 21% more on health benefits, than comparable departments without formal bargaining rights. These aren't inherently bad outcomes if they reflect genuine market rates and help retain quality officers. But when a municipality lacks the data to evaluate whether a proposal is in line with regional norms, every negotiation becomes a gamble with taxpayer dollars.

The Parity Problem

Municipal bargaining has an additional complexity that makes reliable data even more critical: parity dynamics between unions. When a police union secures a particular settlement, the fire union will expect something comparable and vice versa. A single settlement that overshoots the market can cascade across multiple bargaining units, compounding the fiscal impact.

Without access to comprehensive, real-time settlement data from comparable communities, municipal leaders have no reliable way to evaluate whether a union's demand reflects genuine market conditions or an aggressive negotiating position. 

And unlike school districts, where salary schedules and contract terms are often publicly posted, municipal compensation data, particularly for police and fire, can be much harder to access. FOIA requests are often seen as hostile acts that damage the very relationships municipal leaders depend on for cooperation.

What Changes When Both Sides Have the Data

When municipal leaders have access to the same caliber of compensation intelligence that unions do, something important shifts: the conversation moves from adversarial to analytical. 

Instead of debating whether a community's public safety compensation is competitive, both sides can look at the same benchmarking data and focus on what a sustainable, fair agreement actually looks like given the municipality's financial reality and regional market.

This doesn't mean negotiations become easy or that disagreements disappear. But it does mean that the foundation of the conversation is shared facts rather than competing narratives. And that's where better outcomes come from for municipalities, for their employees, and for the taxpayers who fund it all.

More informed negotiations mean settlements that municipalities can sustain over the life of the contract, avoiding the kind of structural budget imbalances that force painful cuts to other services. They mean compensation packages that are genuinely competitive for recruitment and retention — not just reactive to the loudest voice at the table. 

This builds the kind of trust between municipal leaders and union representatives that makes each subsequent cycle more productive.

Closing the Gap

This is exactly the problem that Litix Insights was built to solve. Founded by former public sector administrators who experienced the data gap firsthand, Litix Insights gives municipal leaders access to thousands of real-time data points including salary benchmarking, settlement forecasting, fringe benefits analysis, and interactive budget modeling all purpose-built for collective bargaining.

Rather than spending weeks compiling spreadsheets or thousands of dollars on one-off consulting engagements, town administrators, city managers, and HR directors can instantly benchmark their compensation against comparable municipalities, model the long-term cost of proposed settlements, and walk into negotiations with the same level of data-driven confidence that unions have had for years.

This isn't about tipping the scales against public safety employees. Police officers and firefighters deserve competitive compensation — and communities deserve the confidence that they can recruit and retain the professionals who keep them safe. Litix Insights is about ensuring that the negotiation process is grounded in reliable data rather than guesswork, so both sides can reach agreements that are fair, sustainable, and defensible to the communities they serve.

The Massachusetts Municipal Association has already partnered with Litix to bring this capability to communities across the Commonwealth, and the platform continues to expand. Municipalities that adopt Litix Insights report that it fundamentally changes the dynamic at the bargaining table,  — transforming negotiations from adversarial battles into data -informed discussions.

Ready to bring data-driven confidence to your next negotiation cycle? Learn more about Litix Insights for municipalities.