He kept a $300,000 probe of groups planning to agitate the Republican National Convention secret from the people whose permission he needed to spend the money, it was revealed Tuesday.
Before the Sept. 1-4 event at the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, Fletcher led pre-emptive raids on homes and gathering places of activists throughout the Twin Cities, recovering alleged weapons but also drawing criticism from some leaders.
There's still tension over the convention, which saw more than 800 people, including journalists, arrested amid tear gas and vandalism in the streets. Today, a city-paid blue-ribbon commission will release its findings into how the law-enforcement agencies handled it all. Among the commission's scope is how investigators — including Fletcher's — gathered pre-convention intelligence.
On Tuesday, Fletcher said publicly it cost his department $305,000 to pay overtime or temporary salaries to nine investigators to travel around the country tracking and infiltrating the groups, which included self-described anarchists. The team, which worked alongside at least one St. Paul cop as well as FBI agents, also tallied $15,000 in travel expenses.
Fletcher said he was glad he kept it secret. "We chose not to have the (St. Paul) city attorney aware of what we were doing," Fletcher said. "Look at what happened after: You had one City Council member vocal in his opposition to what we did. I don't want him knowing."
Fletcher was referring to Council Member Dave Thune, who was critical of the pre-convention raids.
Before the convention, law-enforcement agencies from throughout the state negotiated agreements with St. Paul to provide security and investigative forces for the convention. The agreements were public as part of oversight into how much local taxpayers would be on the hook and how much would be reimbursed with a $50 million federal grant.
Fletcher negotiated $1.8 million of that money to detain prisoners and provide mobile field forces to quell violence on the streets.
On Tuesday, he revealed he's also adding on $400,000 — $305,000 of which is for the secret investigation. Of the remainder, $24,000 is for overtime and temporary salaries for waterways patrols — a task Fletcher initially wanted to lead, but he was rebuffed by the city — and $69,000 for securing county-owned buildings, including the Landmark Center.
County commissioners agreed Tuesday to fill those holes in Fletcher's 2008 budget after Fletcher said he expected the entire $400,000 eventually will be reimbursed by St. Paul as part of the federal grant.
City officials said the request to the federal government has not been finalized.
Typically, the county board approves the overall budget of the sheriff's department but not specific investigations.
In all, Fletcher spent $1.6 million more than the department's 2008 budget, largely because of the RNC. But the number is deceiving because much of the expenses were offset. For example, housing of federal immigration prisoners and state inmates at the county jail brought in some $672,000 in revenue more than budgeted.
In the end, assuming the federal reimbursement comes through, county property taxpayers will chip in only an extra $175,000 to Fletcher's budget. The amount is equivalent to overtime for hospital security for inmates, an expense that shot up after a diabetic inmate died and corrections officers decided to bring inmates with medical issues to the hospital sooner.
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