There are about 113,000 people, active and retired cops and their families, who rely on the PBA for all their health and welfare benefits and countless other types of assistance. It takes nothing less than a major corporation to deliver those services. Managing any large corporation efficiently requires all kinds of professional people: accountants, lawyers, computer managers, benefits experts, political lobbyists, public relations and communications professionals. It requires clerical and administrative staff to keep the day-to-day work of the union moving. That’s what makes the PBA like any other corporation.

While the PBA delivers those essentials, board members and delegates have to fight the daily battles faced by working police officers. Unlike most corporations, and given the line of work that empowers the use of deadly force, those daily battles are many and hard-fought between the PBA and the NYPD.

Still, while a delegate is getting in some commanding officer’s face on the street, someone has to be back at the ranch, paying those dental claims, processing optical requests and seeing to the payroll. Every well-run corporation requires an honest, ethical and hard working president — chief executive officer of the corporation — and strong and committed executive officers to support him. It is up to the president to set priorities and steer the organization in the right direction. In the era of Enron and other corporate scandals, an honest CEO is an irreplaceable asset to a corporation.

“When our team arrived at the PBA offices, we couldn’t even get in without someone hitting a buzzer to unlock the doors, and that was wrong. This is a service organization that exists exclusively to help police officers and their families, and when we got here, it wasn’t doing a very good job of it. Our team had its work cut out for it,” Lynch said.

It has taken many 12- to 15-hour days, seven days a week, to right the ship, during times when the institution was facing many external challenges, including the defense of Street Crime Unit officers, the specter of the federal monitor, the PERB’s constitutionality challenge through three courts in the state, the World Trade Center attacks — raising issues never before confronted by the city and this union — and the everyday response to our members’ needs.

Lynch made it a priority to have expert in-house talent and to professionalize the staff at the PBA to improve efficiency and members’ services.

“As far as I’m concerned, the PBA is all about service to its members,” Lynch said, “and you can’t deliver great service without great people administering the operation.”

The first challenge was the health and welfare funds. The retiree fund was broke and the active fund was being used to shore up the retiree fund as well as to provide benefits for active police officers and their families.

The funds had suffered because of the rise in the cost of prescription drugs, and the Lynch administration attacked the problem on two fronts. First, Lynch and company brought in a “request-for-proposal system” that had drug plans competing for PBA business. A new prescription plan was brought in that cost less and offered better service to the members. On the second front, the PBA initiated a lawsuit against six major drug companies that were conspiring to keep drug prices high by manipulating patents on brand-name drugs that should have become lower-priced generic medications.

Lynch believes that if the PBA is to serve its members successfully in the long term, it needs to enlist the best managers available to keep it running administratively while the board and delegates fight its active members’ daily battles. “I knew that we needed to have a professional benefits manager on board to administer the plans for the long run, so we searched for right person. Ultimately, we hired Carmine Russo away from GHI where he administered the plan for the entire City of New York, representing 760,000 active and retired employees and family members. Carmine brings the professionalism and stability that the PBA needs to keep its benefits program strong.”

Of course, supplying benefits to over 100,000 people requires a dependable, modern computer system, and the PBA’s had been at the end of its useful life.

“Most people don’t think much about what it takes to administer a benefits program like the PBA’s,” Lynch said. “But if they don’t get their reimbursement in a timely fashion or can’t get a cavity filled because a benefits computer is on the blink, they would have every right to complain.”

Once again the PBA began a search for a computer manager who could design and implement a computer system that would guarantee that all benefits would be well managed. That man was David Lepelstat, who became the PBA’s in-house Information Technology (IT) Director. Lepelstat came from the private sector where he managed an IT department of 13 employees and over 600 computers.

“Since joining the PBA’s staff, David has been upgrading and modernizing our computer systems without interrupting the PBA’s ability to provide benefits to its members,” Lynch said. “And he has also saved quite a bit of our members’ money in the process while developing a system that has a solid back-up so we can ensure that our members’ claims will be handled quickly and efficiently, even when disaster strikes,” Lynch noted.

Because the PBA represents police officers who enforce the law and are authorized to use deadly force under certain circumstances, it is a union that is sued and sued frequently. And yet, when Lynch and his team arrived at the PBA, there wasn’t an in-house general counsel to oversee litigation and advise the board on important legal matters. “The PBA had lawyers on retainer,” Lynch said, “but there wasn’t anyone whose fulltime commitment and responsibility was to the union and its members. Once again, we started searching for the right fit for a tough job.”

The right fit came in the form of Michael Murray, a decorated former cop out of Manhattan North, the 19th Pct. and the 23 Pct. who came from a police family, having left the job to practice law.

Murray was an editor of the Fordham Law Review and clerk in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. For years, he worked at two of the largest Wall Street Law firms, servicing multi-national corporations.

“Even when I was working at a private law firm, I had a strong and continuous interest in what was going on in the NYPD,” says Murray. “So when the opportunity came to join the PBA and help police officers as the general counsel, it was a real home-coming for me.”

Murray and his staff handle much of the PBA’s litigation and all of its internal departmental grievances. Murray also oversees the suits that require specialized legal expertise and are parceled out to specialty law firms. David Nicholson, whom Murray had met while working for a private law firm and who handles all of the PBA’s grievances with the NYPD, is also a former police officer whose father retired as a captain from the Transit Police Department.

“I think it’s important to have professional people who have some law enforcement background at the PBA because they can better relate to the problems that police officers routinely face,” Lynch observed. “We now have a strong in-house legal team that understands policing because they’ve done it,” he added.

To round out the team, Lynch wanted an experienced, executive-level communications person to manage the PBA’s internal and external communications. The PBA had been relying on an expensive contracted public relations firm that essentially did part-time work when needed. What they did, they did well, but only when called upon to deal with a problem. “New York is the media capital of the world, and the PBA needed a well-known and respected communications director to tell the PBA’s story to the city,” Lynch said. “We needed someone who could find the stories from inside the PBA and the NYPD and present them to the media to get us some ink in support of our members’ needs.” After a search, the PBA came upon former Transit Police spokesman Al O’Leary who was serving as the Vice President for Public Affairs at New York City Transit. With 30 years of government experience, nearly nine years as a member of the Command Staff of the Transit Police, and a great deal of good will among the reporters all over the city, O’Leary was a good fit. He joined the PBA in April 2002, and hit the ground running during the thick of the PERB hearings.

“I come from a police family,” O’Leary said. “My father was an NYPD sergeant and my son was an NYPD police officer who rolled over to the Port Authority Police Department after September 11th, so I can appreciate the demands and stresses that are on police officers and their families,” he added. “I’m delighted to have an opportunity to help fight for better pay and conditions for New York City’s police officers, who are the hardest working and, tragically, among the lowest paid in the nation.”

Lynch summed up the professionalization of the PBA: “I believe we now have one of the most talented groups of professional and technical people working for any union in this city. And they are all here to do one thing — help to improve the lives and jobs of active and retired police officers.”

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