It’s hard to know what Michael Imondi, the president of the police union in Providence, Rhode Island, does all day.
He is carried on the city’s payroll as a police officer in the patrol division, assigned to “Car 76.” He draws full pay and benefits from the city, just like any other cop. And yet he cannot be assigned any specific duties, hours, beats, or posts.
It has been years since Imondi has worked the streets as a regular patrolman. Instead, his job with the city is to work full time for his union, the Fraternal Order of Police’s Providence Lodge #3.
Imondi is on paid union release time. That is the practice whereby government employees are released from their regular jobs to do union work while still drawing full pay and benefits from the taxpayers.
Assigning Imondi to a designated patrol unit is a bit unusual. Allowing him paid release time to work exclusively for the union is not.
The Goldwater Institute identified at least 16 jurisdictions that allow at least one full-time release position when it surveyed the state departments of corrections, capital cities, and largest school districts in each state. That means the sole duty of the people in those positions is to work for their unions.
Many jurisdictions allow more than one union official to be on full-time release. So between them, the 16 jurisdictions have at least 61 government employees who are paid to work exclusively for their unions while still being paid by the taxpayers.
There may be more.
Like Providence, many jurisdictions do not identify full-time release positions clearly in their union contracts. Instead, they cloak the union work under the guise of being departmental labor liaisons or some other euphemism, such as being assigned to Car 76.
In some cases, government employers do not specify how many union officials can be on full-time release. Instead, they allot a bank of thousands of paid hours that union officials can parcel out as they see fit. For instance, in the Miami-Dade School District in Florida, the teachers’ union is allotted about 20,000 hours of paid release time, the annual equivalent of about 10 full-time positions.
Imondi does not see his full-time assignment to the Providence police union as the waste of a trained and experienced police officer or a misuse of taxpayer dollars. In fact, he says, it saves department administrators headaches and the city money in the long run. If he did not have full-time release, then he could be called off his regular patrol shift whenever union business came up. If that happened, a replacement would have to be called in, probably on overtime, to meet minimum staffing quotas, he said.
Imondi said he could be called back to police duty in an emergency, though as far as he knows that hasn’t happened since the late 1990s.
“We are still police officers in the city of Providence,” Imondi said when asked why taxpayer dollars rather than union dues are used to pay his salary and that of the union’s vice president, who is also on full-time release. “We are still in the uniformed division. We are still able to be called in at a moment’s notice, and we are still actively on the job.”
As to what he does all day, Imondi said it varies. Lately he’s been dealing with employee representation and legal protections for police officers in disciplinary actions.
Imondi says he is not required to account for his time to city officials, or to work from any particular location so long as he puts in his eight hours per day.
“To actually put a time stamp on everything we do, we wouldn’t be able to do that,” he said.
City administrators in Providence did not respond to requests for comment. They also do not track the hours and cost of paid release time the city allows its unions.