Dear COBA Members;

As we informed you in previous correspondence, regarding the ongoing Longevity case, the Appellate Court called up to hear the Longevity cases of the PBA and the Detective's Assoc. To date the Court has yet to provide a reason why they called up those two cases and not all 5 Nassau Unions together. As such, COBA, CSEA and the Police Superior Officers Union petitioned the court to merge the cases but they stated no, and went ahead with a hearing on the PBA and Detective's cases on October 20th.

All 5 County Unions watched the hearing live on a Zoom video conference in the COBA office with our Attys in attendance. The case was very well litigated by the PBA/DAI Atty and we were all satisfied with the case presentation.

All 3 remaining unions (COBA, CSEA and the PDSOA) agreed to not petition for separate oral argument hearings because we did not want to give the County's Atty any more bites at the apple to present their case. Also, the argument presented was a blended argument formulated by all 5 Union attys anyway, with yeoman's work done by our Atty Liam Castro.

Since then, we have been awaiting the Court's decision to either direct an additional hearing for the rest of us or whether the remaining union's cases will be affected by the Oct 20th hearing. To date we have not been given any direction by the court on that issue.

With that said, today the Appellate Court ruled in favor of the PBA and DAI's cases and directed what we all want, which is for this case to be put forward to Arbitration. That is where the case belonged to begin with and not in the Courts.

This is a very good win. One that we hope will in fact affect all 5 Unions.

But remember, this is a good battle win, the war continues.

At this point we do not know the Court's intention as to whether they want another hearing/s for the rest of us or if today's decision will affect us all by proxy.

Today, we conferenced with our attys and the attys of the other unions to make sure we're all on the same page.

We are now petitioning the Court to rule that today's decision does indeed cover all parties involved, so we can all proceed to arbitration without further delay.  

I will keep you informed as this case progresses.

In Unity;

Brian Sullivan, COBA President