Ravenstahl Does Good

It's been a very long and busy week out in the Pennsylvania Operating Area. Endless man overboard drills, simulated boardings and searches of merchant vessels, deceptive lighting competitions, main space fire drills, formation steaming, DIVTACs, flight operations, and a constant stream engineering casualty exercises (BECCEs) kept us up through all hours of the night. The battle group finally returned to homeport a few days ago, and all hands -- including myself -- were given a 24-hour liberty to recover. It's amazing how sane, and even mundane, Pittsburgh's political scene appears to be when viewed from well over the horizon. Up close, however, the ugly truth becomes disturbingly obvious.

But this morning, there is some good news to report. I once promised that, if Pittsburgh's Interim Mayor, Luke "The Anointed One" Ravenstahl were to do anything that I agreed with, I would be sure to praise him in this space. He finally has done some good, and I both recognize and thank him for doing so.

As the Post-Gazette and the Tribune-Review are reporting this morning, the police secondary employment story is once again back in the news. Months after the story first appeared here in the burghosphere, it would seem that we finally are seeing a reinstatement of the city's cost recovery fee. Beginning next week, the city will charge $3.85 per hour whenever an off-duty police officer is employed by a private entity. According to my own calculations, this new fee should bring in more than $730,000 to cover the expenses -- liability, litigation, worker's compensation, wear and tear on city property, and replacement of expended consumables -- that it incurs when city police officers hire themselves out to private employers.

I'm impressed by this move by the Ravenstahl administration. In my own cynical way, I had fully expected that they would simply ignore this issue yet again. Once Mr. Ravenstahl's only election opponent, City Councilmember Bill Peduto, had dropped out of the race, I figured that the new cost recovery plan -- which the interim mayor had promised to institute in time for the Pirate's April 9th home opener -- had little hope of seeing the light of day. At the very least, I had expected that it would be significantly scaled back to some meaningless amount. But Luke Ravenstahl has proven to be a better man than I had anticipated, and his plan certainly appears to be worthy of our admiration.

One wonders, of course, if any of this would have taken place without the protests of the burghosphere. But regardless of his motivation, Mr. Ravenstahl has set a cost recovery fee that should truly recover the taxpayers' costs. And for that, I salute him.

As is a bit normal in the wake of an announcement like this one, the media accounts are a bit confusing about what the new cost recovery plan will entail. It seems clear that the new fee will amount to $3.85 per hour, which just so happens to be precisely 10% of an officer's hourly wage ($38.54), at least when the employment is scheduled through the police department's Special Events Office. It is a bit less clear, however, exactly what will happen to this fee in the future. The news reports only mention this flat $3.85-per-hour amount, and don't tell us how it is calculated. Will this fee be recalculated every year, so that it remains at 10% of the officers' hourly wage? Or is it fixed at a flat $3.85-per-hour, where it will stay for years on end until inflation renders it meaningless?

Also less than clear is whether the Special Events Office will take control of all secondary employment details. Rich Lord's Post-Gazette story indicates that some police officers will continue to serve as third-party contractors who dole out the assignments to some of the more lucrative secondary employment details:

The new plan includes a concession to the union -- allowing businesses to use entrepreneurial officers as "designated schedulers" rather than getting officers solely through the Police Bureau's events office. The bureau spent $30,950 in 2005 on software for scheduling the jobs.

Several officers run lucrative businesses in which they place colleagues in side jobs in return for a cut. The city would get $3.85 an hour for the scheduler's time, and for each officer scheduled through them.

SMG [the company that currently handles all events at Mellon Arena] will continue to handpick officers, [General Manager Jay Roberts] said.

I'm not certain who will end up paying for the services of these designated schedulers. Regardless of who does the scheduling, the city will still get its $3.85-per-hour fee for each officer who is employed. So I guess that each of the officers who are provided with work by one of these designated schedulers will be expected to fork over some of their wages to pay the scheduler for this honor. Call it what you like, but to me this sounds very much like a kick-back scheme.

Meanwhile, Jeremy Boren's piece in the Tribune-Review makes it seem like all work will be run directly through the Special Events Office, and that "designated schedulers" are a thing of the past:

Ravenstahl also will stop officers from arranging off-duty side jobs for their colleagues and taking their own cut, Skrinjar said.

"The whole idea is to bring this under the control of the police department, without any freelancing by individual officers," said Skrinjar, who added that all off-duty assignments will be tracked by computer.

Before November, only businesses that hired officers directly through the city paid the fee. But about two-thirds of all moonlighting jobs were privately arranged between businesses and individual police officers, at varying rates, city records show.

Police Lt. Thomas Atkins, who privately arranged for officers to work Pirates games, said he would abide by the city's decision.

"I'm a team player," he said. "Whatever they tell me to do, that's what I'll do."

"This would make if fair so that everyone can bid on the same jobs," said Jim Malloy, president of police union Fort Pitt Lodge No. 1.

You will pardon me for being confused here. One story says that there will still be role for these "designated schedulers", and the other article says there will not. But if "designated schedulers" are going to exist, the Trib article at least makes it appear as though the jobs will still be entered into the department's computer system. If true, then this brings additional good news for the city and its school district, since together they stand to collect more than $200,000 in wage taxes from these secondary employment details. In the past, many of these jobs were done "under the table", and these taxes went unpaid. As long as the officers' wages are being paid through the city's payroll system, this sort of tax evasion should now be a thing of the past.

Hopefully, the city and the police department will be vigilant, and will institute rules which forbid officers from working outside of the official secondary employment system.

I have to be fair to Luke Ravenstahl. Without an opponent in the coming election, he easily could have sat on his hands here. He could have instituted no fee whatsoever, waited out the inevitable howls of protest that would have come from the burghosphere on April 9th, and placated all of the powerful interests who had rebelled against the earlier fee until he eliminated it last November. But instead, he actually went forward with a decision that will anger these internal factions, but will be very good for city taxpayers.

I'm truly impressed. Good job, Mr. Ravenstahl.