Ohio public workers deserve no protections on impairment

Many drivers in the Buckeye State likely echo the incredulous sentiments of Doug Scoles, executive director of the Ohio chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, when learning that many highway patrol and other public employees are protected from discipline when having blood-alcohol levels in their systems that would land some of us in jail.

“Why’s that even in the contract? That’s flabbergasting to hear,” Scoles said.

Not only is it flabbergasting, it also sets bad public policy that flies in the face of safety, responsibility and fairness. In an age when zero tolerance for alcohol consumption has become the accepted norm in many circles, it is unacceptable and foolhardy to give a pass to those charged with enforcing sobriety statutes in the state.

As The Dayton Daily News reported in an investigative project late last month, Ohio State Highway Patrol troopers, state parks police, clerks and other public employees can’t be disciplined for registering a blood-alcohol concentration below .04 percent. In some contracts, it’s as high as 0.8 percent, the trigger for an Operating a Vehicle Impaired charge for an adult. Similar rules apply to some local police and fire departments in the state, according to The Daily News.

The contract language is based on the point at which it is illegal to operate a commercial vehicle under federal law, though the federal government requires regulated entities to have a policy against drivers with a concentration between .02 and .04 who perform safety-sensitive functions

Clearly enforcing the rules of the road ranks as not only a safety-sensitive function, but a safety-above-all-else function. Any potential impairment — however slight that may be — of an officer’s ability to do that job must not be tolerated.

But tolerated it is. Under current contract language, a patrol officer could cite a driver under age 21 with a BAC higher than 0.020 for OVI, but the officer writing up the citation could legally have a BAC of 0.039.

Such a double standard feeds wildly into public cynicism that those charged with enforcing the law consider themselves above the law.

Core Values

In defending the BAC inclusions in state contracts, OSHP Spokeswoman Lt. Anne Ralston said, “In no way is coming to work with any amount of alcohol or drugs in an employee’s system in line with our Core Values or our mission,” she said, adding that such BAC provisions historically have been included in contracts for state workers.

We would argue that it is one historic provision that has seriously outlived its usefulness. In an era of hyperawareness of the dangers of excessive alcohol consumption and at a time when the National Transportation and Safety Board is lobbying aggressively for a lower 0.5 blood-alcohol threshold for drunken-driving arrests in all 50 states, the laxity afforded patrolmen and other public officials flies in the face of logic and sound public policy.

And if, as Ralston and others say, no officer with any demonstrative impairments would be allowed to work, the overly generous BAC contract provisions also prove to be unnecessary.

That’s why any BAC tolerance above 0 should be stricken from public employee contracts in the next rounds of negotiations. In doing so, patrol officers and other public employees would enhance their credibility, and the public would have one less round of ammunition to use to deride their trusted public servants as hypocrites.