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“Obviously with the economic downturn we’re talking about cutting spending and thinking
of new revenue and there was a topic that you brought up a few months back to raise
revenue in the state and that was to replace police details with civilian details and i
don’t know what part of the government turned down that idea, but I was wondering what kind
of progress you’re making with that and how it will benefit the people of the Commonwealth
of Massachusetts?” “So everybody know what Jonathan’s asking
about? Flaggers, yeah, civilian flaggers. The agency that has most to do with that issues
in transportation; it’s mostly roadwork, not exclusively but mostly roadwork. And we
imposed a policy that was a blended approach that said that civilian flaggers would be
used on public construction projects where state money is funding the project unless
public safety required a trained and uniformed police officer. So for example, if there’s
roadwork on a cul-de-sac, a dead end, somebody’s digging up the road, it’s in the middle
of the day, a flagger can handle that. I’m using extremes to make a point. If its roadwork
on the Masspike and traffic’s going by at 70 mph and they’re not jersey barriers,
maybe you want to have a police officer there. So we’ve tried to strike that balance and
I think it was a wise and appropriate balance. There are cities and town that make their
own decisions about whether to use police details or civilian flaggers on city-funded
or town-funded projects; we can only influence what the state is funding. And they go different
ways depending. There’s one last piece that has to do with what flaggers are paid that
we’re trying to work through because right now flaggers, like the police details, were
a part of the bid from the contractor that comes to do the job and like everything that
comes in a contractors bid, and there’s nothing evil about this, it’s very transparent
it’s just they put a little kicker on top as the contractors cut and so we’ve been
trying to figure if it isn’t effectively more cost effective to hire those civilian
flaggers as state employees, rather than have them hired through the contractor so we don’t
have to pay that little sweetener, that little kicker that the contractor gets but, yes,
that’s not the right way to put it but the you know what I mean- the contractors overhead,
sorry. So that’s where that is, I think that was the right thing to do, it was not
about disrespecting uniformed police officers or any such thing it is about trying to get
the very most out of every buck that the state spends.”