PROVIDENCE — Mayor David N. Cicilline is facing criticism this week for a one-time payment of retroactive raises to five current and former high-ranking police officers –– over the objections of the City Council –– and for his plan to merge the parks and recreation departments.

Cicilline’s administration last month made payments ranging from $14,400 to more than $20,000 to two majors, two retired majors and Deputy Chief Paul J. Kennedy, for time worked from Jan. 1, 2006 to July 1, 2008.

City Internal Auditor James J. Lombardi III contends the payments violate the city budget ordinance and will adversely affect the city retirement system.

“It is an illegal transaction,” says Lombardi. “Clearly the [budget] ordinance provides for an annual salary, and now that annual salary has been substantially overspent.”

Lombardi says that the additional pay will wind up costing the city pension system nearly $250,000 as the raises essentially boost the pensions each officer is receiving or stands to receive. He recommends the council reverse the mayor’s decision.

The administration is standing by its decision to grant the retroactive pay to Deputy Chief Kennedy ($18,074), retired Maj. Stephen Campbell ($20,651), retired Maj. Monty J. Monteiro ($14,413), Maj. Thomas F. Oates III ($15,438), and Maj. Paul C. Fitzgerald ($15,438).

According to the mayor’s chief of administration, Richard I. Kerbel, the retroactive pay for the nonunion officers matches retroactive pay awarded to police union members in arbitration over the last fiscal year and will be paid out of a reserve account for union arbitrations.

“It’s a matter of equity,” Kerbel said Wednesday. “It has been the position of this mayor from day one to make sure that management receives the same raises as union” officers, he said.

Prior to issuing the paychecks, Cicilline’s administration sought legal advice from its law department, but an opinion about the police officers’ retroactive pay was “misunderstood,” Deputy City Solicitor Adrienne G. Southgate said yesterday to the council’s Finance Committee.

“I was surprised that the retroactive pay went back two years,” she says. “My casual response was misunderstood by the administration as providing the authorization not only to grant the Providence Police command staff the same FY’09 raises provide in the underlying collective bargaining agreement, but also the increases given to the rank-and-file in previous fiscal years.”

The City Council complains that the administration ignored a prior directive not to approve any retroactive pay raises for nonunion officials.

“There is no line item in the budget. There is no allocation for retroactive paychecks for nonunion workers,” says City Council Finance Committee Chairman John J. Igliozzi. “If it is not in the budget, you can’t spend it.”

He said that during budget deliberations last summer, council members approved pay raises for nonunion and command staff in the police and fire departments, but consistently rejected the idea of budgeting for retroactive pay.

Southgate says that as long as the Police Department budget had sufficient funds to cover the additional expenses, the administration was within its legal rights.

At last night’s full council meeting, Ward 13 Councilman John J. Lombardi (no relation to the city auditor) submitted a resolution requesting that the panel hire a lawyer to provide a legal opinion on the retroactive pay issue. The resolution was referred to the Finance Committee.

“There is no law that says that what the union gets, nonunion members get,” said Igliozzi. “When you leave the union for management, you give up certain things, but the tradeoff is that you are making more money and earning a better pension … there is no contractual obligation here. This is a unilateral decision by a few people to take care of a few people.”

MEANWHILE, Councilman Lombardi says that Cicilline’s planned merger next month of the Parks Department, which has an $8.5-million operating budget, and the Recreation Department, which has a $1.8-million budget, requires voter approval of an amendment to the City Charter.

Last month, Cicilline announced he was merging the two departments to offer greater services to residents. While the charter lists the agencies as separate entities, city Director of Operations Alix Ogden said that Article 14, Section 3 authorizes the mayor to reorganize departments.

And there is precedent, Ogden said: the Department of Public Works and the Department of Traffic Engineering are currently listed as separate departments in the charter, but traffic engineering has been operating as a division of public works for at least the past three years, she said.

pmarcelo@projo.com