Unions, taxpayers: Tango or tangle?

What do you get when you comb through hundreds of pages of collective bargaining agreements, conduct a couple dozen interviews and produce half a dozen stories on Kootenai County's unions, with a full-page chart that compares union employee benefits versus those of workers from six Kootenai County-based businesses?

A headache, for one.

But also, a pretty informative series that will help citizens understand a little more about how their tax dollars are being used and how their benefits stack up in the private-public employee debate.

Full disclosure: After reading the collective bargaining agreements of the City of Coeur d'Alene's three unions, the three county fire district unions and the county's three school districts, we thought we needed an objective party to help us sort through the legalese and help define key points in those agreements. We enlisted the aid of an attorney in Washington state who specializes in employment law and is knowledgeable about workplace practices and benefits. He agreed: It was a massive headache to go through all those agreements, but in the end he produced a 15-page memo highlighting some of the key wage, benefit and work condition points, which we've incorporated into the series.

With the possibility that next year Idaho will join Wisconsin, Ohio and other states in scrutinizing unions in the public workplace, we've done our best to share the perspectives from union supporters and from public officials who have chosen not to engage in collective bargaining. Because The Press already has published extensive stories on public employee wages, that's not the focus of this series. Instead, we look more at benefits, less apparent than wages, and hope to arm citizens with more information about the role unions play in our public workplaces.

That way citizens then can begin to answer the question that's headed this way: What role should unions play in our public workplaces?

"State of the Union" starts tomorrow.