Copyright Mechanicsburg Patriot News
HACC’s faculty union and the college’s administration failed to reach a deal during a bargaining session Wednesday night that lasted a mere 12 minutes, according to the union, leaving open the possibility that faculty may return to striking in the coming days. Union members are planning to be in their classrooms on Thursday, union leadership said Wednesday night. Faculty were on strike Monday and Tuesday, marching a picket line at the entrance to HACC’s Harrisburg campus, before returning to work Wednesday ahead of the renewed negotiations. HACC administration “presented nothing new,” union leaders said in an announcement Wednesday night, and most of the brief meeting was spent working out dates for additional bargaining over the next two weeks. In an update on Wednesday, the administration said it “remains committed to reaching a fair and fiscally responsible contract.” Tensions between the union and college management have remained high throughout the more than three-year-long impasse over the union’s initial contract, with faculty still working without any collective bargaining agreement in place despite having voted to unionize in April of 2022. One of the previous sticking points – that HACC was failing to disclose its board of trustees’ meetings in accordance with the Pennsylvania Sunshine Act – also made a comeback this week. On Tuesday, college leadership held its regularly scheduled board meeting. The Sunshine Act, which establishes disclosure requirements for public meetings and records, mandates that — with very few exceptions — agencies must post an agenda for the meeting at least 24 hours in advance. On Monday night, PennLive asked the college’s press office whether Tuesday’s meeting was still going to occur and where an agenda had been posted. At that time, no agenda for the November meeting nor for the prior month’s meeting appeared on the Google Drive page that the college lists on its website for public access to board agendas and minutes. Just after 9:30 a.m. Tuesday — two hours before the board meeting — the October and November agendas were uploaded. The college sent PennLive a link to the Google Drive and stated the agenda had been posted to the page on Oct. 30. When PennLive pointed out that Google lists the exact upload time of every document, the college responded that administrators had mistakenly uploaded the agenda to an employees-only page, but not the publicly-accessible one. “The appropriate HACC employees are aware of this matter. They will update their internal processes and procedures to ensure this situation does not occur again,” the college’s press office wrote. Such a violation – intentional or inadvertent – “opens them up to potential liability, and more importantly, it impedes public access and participation, which is contrary to the purpose of the Sunshine Act,” said Melissa Melewsky, a legal expert with the Pennsylvania NewsMedia Association This isn’t HACC’s first bout with the issue. In 2023, the faculty union sued the college for holding meetings of board committees — sub-groups of the board of trustees that deliberate on specific topics — without ever publicly disclosing them, let alone posting an agenda for them. The college said it would comply, but the union sought a contempt order from the court a year later after HACC began to commit the same violations — including formulating a tuition hike at a committee meeting the college never publicly listed. Publicly subsidized colleges and universities in Pennsylvania are subject to the Sunshine Act; HACC is one of 15 community colleges authorized by state law to receive taxpayer funding, and benefited from roughly $45 million in state assistance last year, plus additional funds from county, municipal, and school district support. As previously reported, major differences remain between the union and HACC’s administration as to the terms of a contract. The college’s most recent proposed deal still gives HACC management sole power over class sizes, scheduling, the creation of new faculty positions and the qualification for them, and other matters on which the union wants to have some input. The college has also offered to increase faculty wages by 9.28% to bring them up to where they would be if union faculty hadn’t been denied their last three cost-of-living adjustments. But the college’s offer is only retroactive to July of this year, with the union pushing for two more years of retroactivity. Further — despite the college and the union saying they had come to an agreement over a clause on intellectual property rights — the college is now accusing faculty of blocking access to course materials. In an email sent to the union’s representative from the Pennsylvania State Education Association (PSEA), of which the HACC union is a part, the college’s attorney alleged that union faculty had blocked access to certain course materials on the college’s online course portal. Some of the materials faculty pulled when striking, such as course assignments and grading information, fall under the ownership of the college and are not proprietary to faculty members, HACC’s attorney argued. Further, “even where Faculty hold intellectual property rights, that ownership does not give them the right to block student access,” the college’s lawyer wrote. The PSEA does not agree. Union membership “is well within their rights with their academic material and their intellectual property,” PSEA liaison Lauri Lebo said Wednesday. The union has about 250 active members, and its contract stands to encompass roughly 750 teaching positions, according to the union. HACC had 6,719 students at the Harrisburg campus for the spring of 2025, its last publicly available enrollment report, about three-quarters of them full-time. Another 5,589 students were enrolled at branch facilities in Lebanon, Lancaster, York, and Gettysburg.
