By Gregory Korte
The Cincinnati Enquirer

DOWNTOWN - The city of Cincinnati has been paying the part-time director of the Citizen Complaint Authority $90 or more an hour while the city looks for a permanent director for the police watchdog agency.

All told, Daniel L. Baker has billed the city for $145,510 since he was brought on as a consultant on the start-up of the new agency in late 2002. The authority is one of the key court-supervised police reforms that followed the police shooting death of Timothy Thomas in 2001.

For that first assignment, Baker's pay was $125 an hour - and wasn't supposed to exceed $20,500. But the scope of the job grew, from 120 hours to 345 hours to 595 hours to 745. The limit grew, too, from $20,500 to $48,635 to $79,875 to $98,625.

One of Baker's duties was to recruit Nathanael L. Ford of Toledo as the agency's first permanent director. But Ford served only five months on the job before resigning in June. City Manager Valerie Lemmie turned to Baker to fill in again.

In his latest stint, Baker has submitted $53,067 in bills for working 25 to 30 hours a week, plus expenses - including $1,036 to commute two days a week from his home in Springboro at 36 cents a mile. The rest of the time he works from home, supervising his staff of four investigators by phone and e-mail.

Previous bills included lunch meetings with the city manager and doughnuts for meetings with police - expenses that would be prohibited for city employees.

S. Gregory Baker, the city's executive manager of police relations, said the cost of the part-time consultant is about the same as a full-time director when fringe benefits are included. He said Daniel Baker was the "obvious choice" to fill in, given his familiarity with the organization. (The Bakers are not related.)

Lemmie has hired the Angus Group - the same executive search firm that recruited her from Dayton - to find and recruit a new permanent director.

The Angus Group's Ted Plattenburg said he's still one or two months away from a hire, which must also be approved by lawyers for the Fraternal Order of Police Queen City Lodge No. 69 and the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio. Both are parties to the settlement of a racial profiling lawsuit that created the agency.

The Angus Group's fee will be 25 percent of the director's first-year salary of about $90,000, or about $22,500.

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E-mail gkorte@enquirer.com