Double your fun

Friday, June 10, 2011

You can say this for Brookline Police Chief William Quigley: Fairly or unfairly, he is now the state’s poster boy for double-dipping.

Quigley, as you probably know from stories in this paper and The Telegraph, is a retired state trooper collecting a pension who is now being paid as the police chief of Brookline. What’s the problem? He’s collecting on both jobs from taxpayers and that has some people, and, finally, some state legislators, concerned.

Now, many people double dip. For instance, someone spends 30 years in the military and retires on a pension. Then, he or she takes a full-time job as a mechanic. No problem; on one hand he’s collecting from the taxpayers, but not on the other. On the other, he’s being paid a salary by a private concern.

Bear in mind that Chief Quigley is not doing anything wrong. Under current state law, it’s fine to double dip as long as your current job is part-time. There is some dispute about whether Quigley is indeed working only part-time, but the Brookline selectmen seem to have settled that to their satisfaction. Well, the satisfaction of three of the five of them, at least, and we’re not trying to say they’re wrong.

But what makes Chief Quigley the poster boy for this issue is this: The stories by our Hattie Bernstein. Had it not been for those stories in the Journal and the Telegraph, no one would have known anything about the issue of double-dipping in Brookline, and the Legislature would have scant, if any, interest in this issue.

Please understand that this is not a situation unique to Quigley. As The Telegraph pointed out in a weeklong series that ends today, former Department of Transportation Commissioner Leon Kenison collects a state pension while serving as administrator of Nashua’s Broad Street Parkway project, paid by taxpayers.

But this all began with Bernstein’s reporting on Quigley, so if the law is changed, it will be him that we all have to thank. Him and the Brookline selectmen.

What is really fascinating here is how arrogant some of the selectmen have been over this issue. They didn’t break any laws, of course, but the way the set up Quigley’s job made it appear that things weren’t on the up and up and, indeed, the state demanded back payments into the pension system.

But instead of just saying, “Sorry, we didn’t handle this very well,” some of the selectmen act as if they had the right to do anything in any way they wished and that no one had the right to question them. Indeed, they blame us for shining the spotlight on this issue.

Hey kids, that’s our job.

The selectmen’s job, on the other hand, is to take care of town business in a forthright and fair manner and to do it without embarrassing themselves or their community. Sometimes, that just seems really hard for Brookline officials to do.