Paul Doughty became head of the firefighters union in 2004.

Journal file

PROVIDENCE — Providence Fire Union president Paul Doughty has not come to work for much of the last three years, staffing what Chief George Farrell said appeared to be a no-show position in the department’s training division instead of working a fire truck.

At the same time, Doughty was making extra cash working overtime shifts to fill the vacancy created when he left his job on a special hazards truck, according to a Journal analysis of department records; Farrell said that amounted to double-billing the city.

The Providence Police and Fire Departments have met with state police to review allegations of financial wrongdoing, State Police Col. Brendan Doherty said today. Two fire chiefs may be disciplined internally for failing to oversee Doughty, according to Chief Farrell, who was appointed chief of the department in May.

“It wasn’t too long that I was here before I was sure that things were going on that shouldn’t have been,” said Farrell, who was president of the Providence fire union from 1996 to 2002.

A month after he took over, Farrell moved Doughty back to special hazards truck 1, the firefighter’s post for nearly 20 years.

Doughty asserts that he has done nothing wrong: he acknowledges that he did not come to work for almost three years, but said he had been authorized to work full-time on union business by Farrell’s predecessor as chief, David Costa. He said that previous union presidents — including Farrell — have been allowed to do union business full-time. The union contract allows the president to take time off for union business, but it does not specify how much.

Doughty said Farrell is investigating him in retaliation for his role in ongoing contract-related conflicts between the union and the city.

“It’s just a tactic to undermine us because of all the acrimony between the two groups,” Doughty said.

Former Chief Costa has moved to Maine, and did not respond to requests for comment. His two assistant chiefs said they knew of no such agreement between Costa and Doughty.

Chief Farrell has been quietly looking into Doughty’s job status since shortly after he took the department’s top spot. He said that only he and two other chiefs knew about the informal investigation until the Journal made inquiries and filed public records requests this fall seeking Doughty’s records. He said that he does not know if Doughty’s actions are criminal, but said that they are clearly inappropriate, and that the department is also at fault for failing to properly oversee its firefighters.

“It’s unacceptable on the administration side, and it’s unacceptable on the president of the union’s side,” Farrell said.

DOUGHTY, 43, is well-known as the face of the vocal Local 799 of the International Association of Fire Fighters, which has publicly and repeatedly clashed with Mayor David N. Cicilline over its contract status, regularly picketing both events he hosts and those he attends.

The union and the city have been unable to agree to contracts since Cicilline took office in 2002, and every fire contract from 2001 through mid-2005 has been decided in arbitration. The department has been working without a contract since 2005.

After his election as union president in 2004, Doughty ratcheted up the pressure on Cicilline. This fall, Cicilline was forced to resign as chairman of Hillary Clinton’s campaign in Rhode Island and promise not to attend her local events, under threats that firefighters would picket Clinton’s appearances; a week later, the firefighters planned to picket a $50,000 federal disaster drill, and Doughty and Farrell clashed publicly before the union backed down and agreed not to picket.

Doughty has been assigned to special hazards truck 1 for most of his 20 years on the department, and his expertise in technical rescue is rare. With construction work on the Combined Sewer Overflow tunnel underneath Providence nearing completion, Doughty was a logical choice to help draft the procedures and train firefighters for tunnel rescue operations.

The Narragansett Bay Commission and the Fire Department finalized an agreement to pay Providence $1 million to train firefighters in rescue operations inside the CSO tunnel.

Providence spent nearly $800,000 of the money on a new special hazards truck and equipment, but $30,000 of the NBC money was used to pay overtime to replace the firefighters assigned to provide training for the tunnel rescue.

Doughty and Lt. William Ken-yon of Ladder Company 1 were shifted to a temporary assignment at the Division of Training in May 2004. Doughty’s spot on special hazards 1 was filled by paying other firefighters overtime.

Doughty and Kenyon worked on tunnel training from May to August of 2004, but then, Doughty said, work on the training programs petered out, partially due to questions over whether firefighters would participate in training without a contract. In the fall, Kenyon was transferred back, but Doughty — who at the time was campaigning for union president — was not.

The training procedure Doughty was commissioned to create was never finished, and tunnel training remains incomplete to this day, according to Assistant Chief for Operations Michael Dillon.

ONCE DOUGHTY became union president, in November 2004, he stopped coming to work altogether, by his own admission. He was never transferred back to the special hazards truck, leaving the city to pay overtime to fill his position.

But Doughty said that he was doing union business the entire time, and that his absence was approved in a verbal agreement between himself and Costa, who served as fire chief from 2004 to the end of last year.

“We had an agreement that I was detached for union business,” Doughty said. “They knew I wasn’t coming in anymore.”

But periodically, Doughty did work overtime, filling the special hazards vacancy created by his absence, and earned tens of thousands extra each year working on the special hazards truck, Farrell said. Altogether, $215,922.96 was paid in overtime to replace Doughty on the special hazards truck from May of 2004 to May of 2007, when Farrell ordered him back to the truck.

A Journal analysis of Doughty’s work logs shows that from January to May of 2007, there were 21 possible overtime shifts on special hazards 1, Group A. Doughty worked 14 of them. Doughty earned an extra $310 per 10-hour shift, and $477 per 14-hour shift, for filling that vacancy.

While most of the shifts were at night, several of the overtime postings were day shifts, when Doughty, in theory, should have been working at the Division of Training, or doing union business, Farrell said.

The overtime shifts were what first got Farrell interested in Doughty’s status.

Shortly after taking over as chief six months ago, Farrell noticed that Doughty was scheduled for an overtime shift on the special hazards 1 truck, which struck him as odd.

“I asked someone, ‘is he working downstairs today?’ And they said, ‘Yeah, he’s working overtime.’ And I said, ‘How is he working overtime? That’s his truck, that’s where he works.’ And they said, ‘He’s still assigned to the Division of Training,’ ” Farrell recounted.

Then, “I asked the Division of Training, ‘Is he involved in training, is he involved in the school?’ They said no.”

Farrell realized that the records show Doughty working the vacancies created by his absence.

“I took a look at it, and I was shocked,” Farrell said. “The firefighter causing the overtime is taking the overtime, and the person who was both causing and taking the overtime was certainly aware of what he was doing.”

Doughty said that he was not double-billing by working overtime shifts. Once he was assigned to the Division of Training, he said, it was irrelevant where he served previously.

“I know it doesn’t sound good, but no matter where I go, because of the way minimum manning is structured, either they’re paying me or they’re paying someone else,” he said. “But at the end of the day, it’s not my spot … for 17 years it’s been my spot, but for those three years or whatever, it wasn’t my spot.”

He said that he has always tried to earn extra money to pay child support by working nights, weekends and holidays, when he could not be performing union business. He could not explain the fact that some of the shifts he worked were daytime, when he should have been at the Division of Training or performing union business.

“I’d have to remember why I was there. I mean, you’re talking over a couple-year period,” Doughty said.

Farrell became more suspicious when he checked department records, and realized that Doughty had not taken a single sick day in 2005 or 2006. Firefighters receive a $500 bonus for any year when they do not take any sick leave, but very few receive it.

Doughty said that he wasn’t sick for two years. But regardless, he didn’t need to call in sick, because he was out on permanent leave and didn’t need to worry about calling in for sick or personal time.

“Well, if you’re detached, how would you call in sick?” he said. “I don’t recall being sick. I mean, I certainly didn’t get injured. I would say I wasn’t sick,” he said.

AT THE END of May, Farrell called Doughty into his office, and told the union president that he would be returning to his truck, effective June 1.

Doughty immediately filed a grievance, asserting that a union official cannot be transferred against his will. He then took off June 2 as a sick day. The grievance has not been pursued.

From June until the end of November, Doughty has been absent 13 days, either for his or a family member’s sickness, or on a personal day. Included in that is a three-day absence in September when he injured his arm, and was required to keep it in a sling.

Since his return to the special hazards truck in June, Doughty has worked roughly 20 hours each week, and called Farrell to request time off for union business when he needs it, both men said.

Doughty’s salary for last year was roughly $55,000, but with overtime and retroactive pay, he made nearly $88,000. On top of his city salary, the union pays him an additional 75 percent of firefighter’s base pay — about $30,000 — for serving as union president.

Other Fire Department officers had also taken note of Doughty’s absence. After Costa’s departure in December 2006, Mark Pare was appointed acting fire chief. On Dec. 19, 2006, Pare wrote a letter to Doughty, stating that the union president would be reassigned immediately to special hazards. The contract, Pare wrote, “does not intend or anticipate that the use of this provision, i.e. union business, will allow union officials to perform little or no regular firefighting jobs.”

But the very next day, Doughty filed a request to take six weeks of vacation time, through January and February, to attend a conference at Harvard. When he returned, the transfer was not dealt with.

Pare said yesterday that Doughty’s transfer was simply lost in the shuffle. “I was very busy,” he said.

Both Pare and Raymond Joyce, chief of the Division of Training, could face disciplinary action for the problems in managing Doughty’s time, Farrell said.

WHILE BOTH sides will now await the results of the police investigation, Doughty asserts that Farrell was once in the same situation — working on a truck or at the training division, and barely ever present — and he handled it the same way.

“I said to him, ‘didn’t you have the same agreement?’ And his answer was, ‘I’m accountable now.’ I remember it verbatim. ... To me it was the epitome of hypocrisy — ‘I’m accountable now?’ So it was OK for you to do it, but now it’s not?” Doughty said.

Farrell denied that outright.

“That’s not true. I worked. I took sick time, I took vacation time. I did all of those normal things that everybody else did.”

He also said that while he was transferred to the training division, he was in the office as much as possible, and he never worked his own vacancy on overtime.

All agree that Doughty’s predecessor as union president, David Peters, worked on a truck at least 20 hours weekly. Peters served the union between Farrell and Doughty, from 2002 to 2004.

But Stephen T. Day, fire union president from 1988 to 1996, said that he was allowed to work on union business full-time, and that he, too, worked overtime shifts on his former truck.

Day said that past practice proves that Doughty’s actions are proper.

“This is a smokescreen issue, this is retaliation for Paul Doughty speaking up to defend his members,” Day said.

To Farrell, that’s ridiculous. He said that had The Journal not started asking questions, he would have handled this internally — to have it come out in public just makes his department look bad.

“There’s no personal agenda here,” he said. No matter how it turns out, Farrell said, it’s a black eye for one and all.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this report incorrectly described the State Police review of allegations of financial wrongdoing. At this time, the State Police are not pursuing a criminal investigation.

dbarbari@projo.com