San Bernardino Press MONDAY, OCTOBER 27, 2014 - NOVEMBER 2, 2014
sanbernardinopress.com
VOLUME 1, NO. 26
Measure Q controversy over police and National firefighter salaries nurses call by Vickie Vértiz on President Obama to issue executive order directing hospitals to follow highest standards for beating Ebola
develops. The first event will be the NaNoWriMo Kick-Off on Saturday, October 25, 2014 from 3:00-4:00 PM. at the Norman F. Feldheym Central Library. This will be a chance to find out about NaNoWriMo and to socialize with other aspiring writers.
With concern escalating across the U.S. about the threat of a wider Ebola outbreak, National Nurses United today called on President Barack Obama to “invoke his executive authority” to order all U.S. hospitals to meet the highest “uniform, national standards and protocols” in order to “safely protect patients, all healthcare workers and the public.” The request, send in a letter to the President, came on a day in which NNU, the largest U.S. organization of nurses, hosted a national call-in conference in which 11,500 RNs from across the U.S. joined to discuss what steps should be taken to confront a virulent disease that the World Health Organization has termed the most significant health crisis in modern history. On the call, RNs from California, the District of Columbia, Florida, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Oregon, and Texas described widespread concerns in their hospitals about inadequate preparedness at a time at least two nurses have been tested positive for the Ebola virus in a hospital where one patient infected by the disease has died.
Please see page 4
Please see page 4
- Photo by Terry Miller
On November 4, the public will decide what to do about salaries for their local police and firefighters when they vote on Measure Q, which wants to set salaries through collective bargaining. The measure attempts to reform San Bernardino Charter Section 186 which created a legal requirement that the salaries of police and firefighters be exactly the average of what ten other California cities with a population between 100,000 and 250,000 pay those positions, reported
the Desert Sun. The way Section 186 works currently is that city and union representatives take a list of all cities in the state with the population requirements mentioned above and take turns crossing off cities, said the Sun. Usually, city negotiators cross out the highestpaying cities, whereas union reps take off the lowest-paying places until they get down to ten cities. One thing both sides of the issue can agree on is that most of those cities are not facing bankruptcy, with which San Bernardino is
struggling. Strained relations between unions and the city are informing this issue. The firefighter union believes the city created a contract on their workers that “demonstrates bad faith,” they told the Sun. “I wish we could trust the city to bargain the way other cities do,” firefighter Kenneth Konior was quoted as saying recently in the Sun, “but the politics of at least the last few years make me think we can’t.” Please see page 2
National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) at the Public Library The San Bernardino City Library will participate in NaNoWriMo this year in conjunction with The Office of Letters and Light, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting creative expression. NaNoWriMo is shorthand for National Novel Writing Month, a worldwide celebration of creative writing that counted 500,000 writers in its 15th year in 2013. The
end goal for NaNoWriMo participants is to write a novel of at least fifty thousand words between 12:01 AM on November 1st and 11:59 PM on November 30th. Quantity is emphasized over quality; the idea is not to produce the Next Great American Novel, but simply to get one’s brain rolling by building characters, plots and ideas for one month to see what