Beverly, Mass. - Beacon Hill leaders support ways to replace some police details with civilian flaggers at road construction sites, saving the state millions and Beverly perhaps $100K annually.

However local officers say details put more officers — who are better trained than civilians and have arrest powers — on the street.

The state House of Representatives last week approved, on a 115-41 vote, the Senate’s version of a $3.5 billion transportation package that includes a provision that will have state transportation and safety agencies write regulations governing the use of police officers and civilian flaggers to manage traffic around construction sites on smaller, lesser used roads.

Police would stay on busy roads and major highways.

State Rep. Mary Grant, D-Beverly, voted in favor of the bill.

Grant said the bill asks the two state agencies to come up with several tiers of projects, considering traffic volume and patterns, crime activity in the area and other factors to determine whether a police details would be needed.

By year-end, state transportation officials will also have to submit a report to legislators detailing the amount of money spent on police details for publicly funded projects in the past five years.

The bill issues “more of a directive than a law,” said Grant, asking state transportation and public safety officials to look at areas where flagmen would be able to be used instead of police. She also noted that the state law would not supercede local union contracts or local law that regulate the use of police details.

The Transportation Finance Commission has said that the state will save $100 million over the next 20 years — $5 million per year — if the system of assigning police details is trimmed back.

“I think people are looking at this seriously because there is no money to waste,” Grant said.

Sgt. Phil McCarthy, president of the Beverly Superior Officers Union, said since mid-2000 there have been 326 documented instances where a Beverly detail officer has initiated a call or assisted with a call.

In that time, officers have assisted with motor vehicle incidents, a choking child and an armed robbery, among other things, McCarthy said.

“We do a lot of police work out there that the flagmen won’t be able to do,” he said. “Every one of those officers out there — their feet are not nailed to the street.”

Civilian flaggers do not have powers of arrest and don’t have the level of training police officers have, McCarthy said.

Specifically, McCarthy said he was working at a detail on Cabot Street in front of St. Mary’s Star of the Sea church. A call came in for an armed robbery at the former Li’l Peach, now Tedeschi food store, on Cabot Street.

“I was there within two minutes — not even,” McCarthy said.
In another instance, a woman with chest pains walked up to a detail officer, who radioed to the station that an ambulance was needed.

“She’s alive today on the account of that,” McCarthy said.
Massachusetts is the only state that does not use civilian flaggers, according to state senators who proposed the law changes.

Other states may not realize the benefit of having police officers at construction sites, McCarthy said, since they don’t have a measure of the crime they could have prevented.

“There’s no way of knowing what the benefits would have been had there been a police officer out there,” he said.

Last year, Beverly police officers were paid $1.2 million in police detail payments flowed through City Hall, with $209,952 of that money paid by city departments and the rest coming from utility and construction companies doing work on city streets.

The city charges $48 per hour and keeps 10 percent as an administrative fee plus 1.45 percent for Medicare, according to Finance Director John Dunn.

“There’s some accounting that goes along with it,” Dunn said about the city’s fee.

Detail pay does not count in the calculation of retirement pay, Dunn said.

MassHighway spent $15.5 million on police details in 2003 and $22.6 million in 2006, which was 4.5 percent of the agency’s construction budget.

The changes at the state level came after an announcement in late March from Gov. Deval Patrick, House Speaker Salvatore DiMasi, Senate President Therese Murray and Transportation Secretary Bernard Cohen that they favored “transportation reforms” that included changes to the health care and pension plans at the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority and retiree health insurance contributions at the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority.

Former Gov. William Weld pushed unsuccessfully to shift away from police details to the use of civilian flaggers. That latest effort initially sought to establish a tiered system to evaluate which roads should be manned by police during construction and which could be left to less expensive civilians.

The Statehouse News Service and CNC reporter Barbara Taormina contributed to this report.