At the beginning of every fiscal year, Montgomery County employees rush to get their piece of $800,000 set aside for tuition assistance.
But police officers need not hurry — that’s because the Fraternal Order of Police union’s contract requires the county to pay for any tuition assistance for police officers, even if the fund has dried up.
No other union has a similar deal with the county.
Funds for the program are given out — at a maximum of $1,730 per employee — to the rest of the county on a first-come, first-served basis. There have been 442 requests since the fiscal year started July 1, according to Human Resources Director Joseph Adler.
Council President Phil Andrews, D-Gaithersburg/Rockville, said the police provision was unfair to the county’s other employees and “really undermines the county’s ability to control spending.”
Former FOP President Walter Bader said having access to outside training was vital for police officers looking to advance their careers, and the county provided few other opportunities for training outside the tuition assistance program.
“It’s a benefit that they have to provide; it’s like health insurance,” Bader said.
Figures for how much the FOP’s arrangement has cost the county were not immediately available, but Adler said the county has had to dip into other funding to meet its obligation.
The tuition assistance program is at the center of an investigation by the County Attorney’s Office into whether funds for the program were improperly used to give public safety employees a discount on guns.
County officials said about 275 police officers have taken a course in the past two years with Applied Sciences for Public Safety, one of the companies under investigation.
Andrews has said the investigation into classes offered by Applied Sciences has heightened the need for a full examination of the entire tuition assistance program. He has promised to “ensure” that the County Council takes a close look at the program, including some of the related agreements between unions and the county.
Another provision Andrews said the County Council would examine is whether members of the police and the firefighters union should be allowed to continue to sign up for tuition assistance without the approval of their supervisors.
“I don’t feel an obligation to provisions that I didn’t agree to and didn’t negotiate to in the first place,” Andrews said.
