City Rolls Another Unlucky 13

For the second time in as many months, the Bloomberg administration has been given evidence of the problems created by reduced starting pay for law-enforcement supervisors, with preliminary results showing that just 13 percent of the Correction Officers who took the Oct. 28 promotion exam for Captain passed it.

It is strictly coincidence that this percentage matches the pass-rate for the NYPD Sergeant exam whose results were released in October.

Our guess is that it is anything but a random occurrence, however, that the low pass-rates for both tests coincide with sharply reduced pay scales for both supervisory jobs that resulted from recent union contracts.

Both the Correction Captains' Association and the Sergeants' Benevolent Association were forced to downgrade pay for future promotees in order to gain the same 5-percent annual raises for incumbents that the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association had under a two-year arbitration award that used a bargain-basement pay scale to offset the costs to the city.

At the time of the PBA arbitration, the deal seemed like a good one for the Bloomberg administration, since it limited the raises to an average cost of just three percent a year, with the savings becoming even greater a decade from now as more of the veterans on the police force departed.

But just as the city has experienced problems recruiting candidates for Police Officer jobs that now start at just $25,100, it is suffering from a dearth of uniformed employees seeking to advance because they are not initially receiving a rise in pay commensurate with their higher rank. There was actually a brief period of a few months when those promoted to Correction Captain had their salaries fall to $1,400 below what they would have been earning as Correction Officers.

More than 1,000 fewer COs applied for the Captain exam than for the previous one in 2004. Even that one, which was administered before the pay cut for new promotees became an issue, did not produce good results, with the city forced to give passing grades to some COs with marks below 50 (the low pass-rate this time is based on a passmark of 70 percent that could conceivably be changed).

As the supervisory unions for Correction note, there is a danger that those who score below 70 and are nonetheless promoted will not be sufficiently versed in departmental procedures, or sophisticated enough about how to apply them, to effectively oversee their subordinates.

Assistant Deputy Wardens'/Deputy Wardens' Association President Sidney Schwartzbaum has urged that the agency hold a new exam rather than promote anyone who scored below 70. But he also made clear his belief that many COs who might score well on the promotion exam have decided the reduced pay scale for Captain, combined with other losses in compensation and time off that would result from their being the least-senior people in the higher rank, mean "the promotion is really not desirable anymore."

At the time of the PBA arbitration award in June 2005, one top Bloomberg administration official indicated that if reducing starting salaries created problems, the matter could be quickly addressed. That has not occurred, however, for reasons that include a continuing stalemate on a new contract with the PBA - which has led other uniformed unions to delay their own negotiations.

The PBA award created major problems for other uniformed unions, but it has also begun threatening the quality of agency supervision. The city has taken notice of this, and its deal earlier this summer with the Lieutenants' Benevolent Association, under which the union's new members will work additional tours but will not have their pay reduced, is its first successful attempt to extricate itself and the unions from the mess that arbitration created.

It serves as a lasting lesson that management shouldn't always measure the quality of its deals strictly by the money that's saved.