Taxpayers across the nation are spending millions of dollars to pay the salaries and benefits of government employees to work exclusively for labor unions, an investigation by the Arizona-based Goldwater Institute has found.

The practice is called “official time” in federal law, or “release” time in local labor agreements reviewed by the Institute. At the federal level, it cost taxpayers more than $129 million in 2009, the last year for which figures are available, according to a report from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.

Similar provisions have become standard in labor agreements between unions and governments at the state and local level. Finding the total cost would require analyzing every government union contract in every state, county, city and school district in the country, a monumental task that those who have studied the issue say has not been done.

But one example exposed by the Goldwater Institute’s investigation shows the City of Phoenix spent about $3.7 million to pay its employees to do union work last fiscal year, which ended in June. Phoenix has agreements with seven unions that represent city employees, allowing them a total of more than 73,000 city-paid hours annually to do union work.

Other cities in the area have similar provisions in their contracts with labor organizations that represent municipal employees.

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The man accused of initiating the drug buy that led to the 2010 death of a Chandler, Ariz., police officer made a plea bargain with federal prosecutors four months earlier to avoid a long prison term, and worked as an informant for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration at some time prior to the deal erupting in gunfire.

But Chandler police did not know John H. Webber had been working with federal officials when they ran a “reverse sting” targeting a quarter-million dollars that Webber and his cohorts agreed to pay for 500 pounds of marijuana supplied by undercover officers. Had the deal gone down as planned, the police would have kept the money under Arizona’s forfeiture law.

After the marijuana was delivered, one of the suspects opened fire with an AK-74 rifle, mortally wounding Detective Carlos Ledesma, according to police reports. Two other undercover detectives were shot, and two suspects were killed during the shootout on West Maldonado Drive in south Phoenix, about 16 miles from the Chandler border.

Maricopa County prosecutors said in court motions related to the ongoing murder case that Webber had worked as an informant for the DEA. However, the agency had stopped using him by the time of the shootout, and he had no authority to initiate the drug deal that led to Ledesma’s death, prosecutors argue.

The Goldwater Institute detailed the events that led to the shooting, and the extensive use of reverse stings by Chandler police, in a report published in March. The agency raised about $3.2 million through forfeitures in the year prior to Ledesma’s death, more than $2.7 million of that from reverse stings, according to city and court records.

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A three-month investigation by the Phoenix-based Goldwater Institute found that a federal program intended to help disadvantaged business owners win contracts at Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix is benefiting a small group of political insiders who are anything but disadvantaged.

The federal Airport Concession Disadvantaged Business Enterprise program (ACDBE or DBE) sets guidelines requiring minimum levels of participation by small businesses owned by minorities and women in airport concession contracting. Award winning investigative reporter Mark Flatten, formerly of the Mesa, Ariz.-based East Valley Tribune, shows that many of the DBE owners at Sky Harbor have a net worth in excess of $1 million and hold multiple city contracts, both on and off the airport.

Of the $52 million in sales attributed to disadvantaged businesses at Sky Harbor in fiscal year 2008, $15.4 million was generated by five DBEs owned by people active in politics. And of the more than 140 individual concession storefronts at Sky Harbor, city records identify only two that are not operated exclusively by a master contractor or owned, at least in part, by a certified DBE.

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