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.

(Click here to read the Goldwater Institute’s full report)

“The taxpayers are getting hatcheted at multiple levels,” said Leslie Paige, vice president of policy and communication at Citizens Against Government Waste, a nonpartisan Washington, D.C., nonprofit that tracks federal spending. “The taxpayers may not even know that they are subsidizing the very people that are picking their pockets.”

The union officials who qualify for release time are government employees. But instead of showing up for their regular jobs, they are released from duty to work for the union. Labor executives defend the use of tax money to pay their salaries as a good investment that leads to a more productive government workforce.

John Gage, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), said in congressional testimony last June that official time has led to better relations between workers and management. That has helped resolve disputes that otherwise could have escalated into costly lawsuits or formal complaints, he said, adding that it also leads to greater efficiency and cost savings for federal agencies.

In the 2009 fiscal year, unions representing federal workers used almost 3 million hours of official time, the equivalent of more than 1,400 full-time employees, at a cost of $129.1 million.

Paying government employees to do union work has become a standard provision in state and local labor contracts, said Patrick Semmens, director of legal information at the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, which opposes the practice.

TAXPAYER ELECTIONEERING

Costs to taxpayers from release time go far beyond the dollars spent on salary and benefits for government workers who do not do their government jobs, said Paige. There is no pressure on the union to settle grievances or agree to concessions when their salaries are not coming out of union dues, she said. Money the unions would otherwise have to spend paying top officers also is freed up for other activities, including electioneering, when taxpayers are footing the bill for salaries and benefits, she added.

A bill to limit union release time at the federal level was introduced this year in the House of Representatives, but has gone nowhere.

Labor unions spent about $96.7 million on federal campaigns alone in the two-year cycle leading up to the 2010 election, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. Three of the top four labor contributors are public employee unions – the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. The top contributor to federal campaigns among labor groups was the Service Employees International Union, which represents workers in both government and private-sector jobs.

James Sherk, senior policy analyst in labor economics at the Heritage Foundation, said release time can end up shortchanging union members, as well as taxpayers. Even in the private sector, management is sometimes willing to pay top union officials if it brings concessions in pay and benefits that will apply to all workers, said Sherk, who advocated eliminating official time at the federal level during congressional testimony earlier this year.

“A lot of managers will say ‘it’s cheaper for me to put a few of them on the payroll than it is to pay the higher wages’” for everyone, Sherk said.

But at least in the private sector, there is pressure on management to control costs or face being wiped out by their competitors. That pressure does not exist in government, where there is no competition and no bottom line to protect, Sherk said.

About 12 percent of the nation’s workforce is comprised of union members, according to 2010 data compiled at Unionstats.com. About 52 percent of them work for some level of government, from federal agencies down to local school districts.

Among government employees, union membership is about 36 percent nationally, according to Unionstats.com. In the private sector, it’s about 7 percent.

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.

Chandler police did not bring federal agencies or Phoenix police into the operation in which Ledesma was killed. If they had, they would have been expected to split the money.

The lack of coordination between police agencies is a dangerous consequence of the profit motive built into forfeiture laws, said Scott Bullock, senior attorney for the Institute for Justice, a non-profit legal firm based in Virginia.

“It’s a strategic decision based upon what is going to make our agency the most amount of money,” Bullock said.

The Goldwater Institute has recommended repealing existing civil forfeiture laws, or at a minimum requiring money police seize in forfeiture cases be put into a neutral account such as the state’s general fund, to sever the connection between agency operations and direct financial rewards.

Chandler police say their decisions were not influenced by the prospect of seizing a quarter-million dollars.

In July 2010, a confidential informant called Chandler narcotics detectives about a group of men wanting to buy a large quantity of marijuana and willing to pay cash. One of those men was Webber, identified in police reports as the man who initiated the deal and one of the people who handled the money.

On the evening of July 28, 2010, Chandler detectives entered the south Phoenix home to complete the sale. Without warning, one of the suspects grabbed a rifle and started shooting, according to police reports.

The bundles of cash were actually one-dollar bills stuffed into counterfeit $100s, according to police. The total take from the operation was $999.

Four months before the shooting, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Phoenix asked a judge in an unrelated fraud case to accept a plea agreement that would allow Webber to avoid any charges in return for his cooperation, court records show.

Webber was on parole for state drug convictions in Kentucky when he was arrested in June 2008, court records show. Conviction on the federal charge in Arizona would have required Webber to return to Kentucky to complete his 15-year prison sentence, in addition to whatever sentence he received for the federal crimes, court records show.

Webber’s lawyer, Michael Souccar, alleged in a court motion that Webber was working as a confidential informant for DEA agents in Phoenix and the state of Washington at the time of the shooting. A few days prior to the shooting, Webber was contacted by a DEA agent about setting up a drug sting, according to the motion. That is what led to Webber’s dealings with other suspects and, eventually, undercover Chandler narcotics detectives, the motion states.

Ramona Sanchez, spokeswoman for the DEA in Phoenix, would not comment on the allegations.

Officials at the U.S. Attorney’s office in Phoenix also would not agree to an interview. They did release a statement acknowledging the plea in the fraud case, but denying federal authorities authorized Webber to engage in the drug transaction.

Webber is not accused of killing Ledesma, but faces three counts of felony murder under a statute which allows people involved in certain crimes to be charged with murder even if they are not the actual killers.

Mark Flatten is an investigative reporter for the Goldwater Institute, an independent government watchdog based in Phoenix, Ariz.

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.

Public records show one of the top beneficiaries of the DBE program is long-time Democratic Party activist and Maricopa County Supervisor Mary Rose Wilcox. Ms. Wilcox entered into a joint venture with Host International in December 2004 to co-own a Chili’s franchise. In violation of federal and city guidelines, Ms. Wilcox did not bring any money to the partnership and has no real role in running the restaurant.

The investigation’s findings were released yesterday in “High Fliers: How Political Insiders Gained an Edge in Sky Harbor Concessions.”

The City of Phoenix could end the racial preference program on its own, but if that doesn’t happen quickly, voters may beat it to the punch. In 2010 Arizona voters will consider a Ward Connerly-backed Civil Rights Initiative that would ban race and gender preferences in government contracting and education programs.  

An interesting long-term question is whether or not race and gender preference programs will be strengthened or eliminated as a result of an Obama presidency. The President himself has said that his daughters shouldn’t be the beneficiaries of any preference programs because they aren’t disadvantaged by either their race or gender. That’s certainly true. And it begs the question of necessity for the hundreds of preference programs in place throughout America today.