Bumpy road ahead for critics of details
Police contracts, limited savings seen as slowing governor's effort
For no other reason than pure jealousy, you might think that city and town leaders would jump at the chance to crack down on police details at road projects and construction sites.
Thanks largely to an impressive $68,280 in detail pay, for example, Newton police officer James McCarthy earned $147,207 during the fiscal year that ended this summer - or about 50 percent more than Newton Mayor David B. Cohen's annual salary. He is one of 36 Newton police employees who pushed their yearly pay over the $100,000 mark by working paid details last year, according to city records.
A Natick police officer, Christopher Salis, 38, earned $129,022 during the same fiscal year, just a few thousand dollars less than Town Administrator Martha White, thanks in large part to $39,216 in detail pay. And Salis wasn't alone; a dozen other members of the town's Police Department pulled down six-figure salaries with help from details.
In Waltham, meanwhile, 28 members of the force earned six-figure salaries by working details, including Patrolman Gerard Corbett. He made $44,138 in detail pay, helping push his yearly earnings to $121,423, according to records provided by the city.
Yet even with the hefty paychecks, people on both sides of the issue are warning taxpayers not to expect a big rush by local officials to limit paid details, despite last month's attempt by Governor Deval Patrick to make it easier for them to do so. The proposed regulations will be the subject of a public hearing on Beacon Hill next week.
Patrick unveiled new state regulations calling for the use of civilians to flag traffic past projects funded by the state Highway Department, as long as they are on state roads with a speed limit under 45 miles per hour or on local streets.
The governor's proposal would not affect the detail pay that communities allow officers to earn while working at locally funded road sites, utility projects, or private businesses. All of the various types of details are counted when Newton, Natick, and Waltham add up how much their officers earn from details each year.
Critics of police-only details hope Patrick's proposal, while limited, will finally crack a longstanding monopoly and pave the way for more widespread use of civilians, which they say would reduce costs significantly. Local police, however, are organizing a campaign to maintain the current system, which they view as a vital part of their compensation.
Patrick's regulations would apply only as long as they don't conflict with "local collective bargaining agreements" with police unions. About a third of the state's police unions have language guaranteeing details written into their contracts, and the Massachusetts Police Association is urging member locals that don't to swiftly add it, executive director James Machado said this week.
"We absolutely want them to do it now," Machado said.
Massachusetts is the only state in the nation where police officers, thanks to a patchwork of local ordinances and contract guarantees, direct traffic at road work and construction sites, according to state officials and police union representatives. While police say details make the public safer by putting more officers on the street, taxpayer associations and conservative watchdog groups have long ridiculed them as examples of wasteful spending.
Yet even officials at the Pioneer Institute, a fiscally conservative Boston think tank that supports the switch to civilian flagmen in principle, say that Patrick's regulations as proposed give local officials little or no incentive to help the state save taxpayer dollars.
"If you are a municipal manager you are definitely between a rock and a hard place on this one," said Steve Poftak, the institute's director of research. "To walk this back in collective bargaining is going to be both difficult and expensive."
According to both sides, state-paid details like those that would fall under Patrick's proposal have long functioned as a de facto state subsidy of local police agencies. Police say such subsidies are particularly important in Boston's affluent suburbs, where housing is expensive and where an officer's base salary is often far less than the average income in the community.
"If the details go, then I think you are going to see police officers choosing to do some other kind of work," said Lieutenant Bruce Apotheker, a spokesman for the Newton police. "It's just going to be too hard for them to make ends meet in this area, given what their base pay really is."
Attempts on Tuesday to reach the top-earning police officers in the three communities through their unions were unsuccessful. Apotheker said that McCarthy was not allowed to speak to the press under departmental policy.
Local officials and police union negotiators have often been able to use details as a way to break bargaining logjams, since raising the hourly rate for details gives officers a chance to earn more money without asking local taxpayers for it.
Patrick's proposal stands that cooperative dynamic on its head, observers said, turning police details into a divisive issue in cities and towns that decide to follow the governor's lead.
Police are likely to demand more base pay, which would have to come out of municipal budgets that are already being cut due to the slow economy and lagging tax revenue, if their opportunities to work details are limited. And even if local officials thought they could win on the issue, it is unlikely that they would relish paying the price that victory would cost in either extra salaries or ill will, Poftak said.
Jeremy Solomon, the spokesman for Newton's City Hall, said details are written into the police contract there, so officials will have little flexibility until next year when bargaining begins on a new agreement.
"It is in our contract, so it appears we will be unable to take advantage of Governor Patrick's proposal," Solomon said. "But we're still studying it."
Another consideration that will have to be weighed by local officials is whether limiting police details would save enough money to make the effort worthwhile. Even officials in the Patrick administration have scaled back their initial estimates of as much as $5 million in annual savings, saying that figure was too high.
Under the state's prevailing wage law, any flagmen used on state road projects would have to be paid the contractually bargained union rate for similar work on private projects, which is between $31 and $38 per hour, and their employers would also have to pay for benefits and unemployment insurance, passing the cost along to the state. A police officer in Newton working the same shift would earn between $40 and $45 an hour, meaning the state would realize only a marginal savings at best, department spokesman Apotheker said.
For such a small savings, he said, it isn't worth taking officers off the street.
The Massachusetts Police Association's executive director, meanwhile, said that officers at some small departments actually make less than $30 per hour for detail work, less than the flagmen would.
"It's ironic that Patrick is the governor who said he was going to put 1,000 new cops on the street," noted Machado. "In the broad scheme of things, this is going to cause a great reduction in police visibility, especially during the day."
Yet despite the limited savings and the reluctance of municipal officials to get on board, Pioneer Institute official Poftak said, the governor should still be lauded for pushing the issue further than some of his predecessors, who criticized details as wasteful but never took concrete steps to limit them.
Even a small step toward reducing wasteful spending is a worthwhile one, he said.
"The intent of public construction projects in the Commonwealth is not to provide a subsidy for any one class of people," Poftak said. "If we're going to ask taxpayers to have enough faith to invest in our state's infrastructure, we're going to have to assure people that their money is being well spent." 