The city of Miami paid assistant fire Chief Veldora Arthur more than $120,000 to stay home after she’d been federally indicted on mortgage fraud charges — despite a policy stating that non-union employees charged criminally should be placed on unpaid leave or reassigned.

For seven months, Arthur’s only work responsibilities were to be in her house 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays, with an hour lunch break, and to call the office twice a day.

The city’s fire union chief says he doesn’t understand why the city didn’t reassign Arthur while she awaited trial.

“Why would they pay to be at home when they could put you to work?” asked union president Robert Suarez. “A few days? It’s not uncommon. A few weeks? Maybe once in a while. But months? I haven’t heard of that.”

On Feb. 3, 2011, federal prosecutors charged Arthur and four others with conspiring to commit mortgage fraud in an $11 million scheme involving luxury condominiums in Aventura. Arthur was arrested eight days later and released the same day on a $120,000 bond.

According to a city administrative policy last updated in 2002, employees charged criminally are to be placed on unpaid leave. Similar to another policy in Miami-Dade County, employees who are found not guilty receive back pay when they return to work. The policy also allows the city manager to transfer the employee to duties pending the conclusion of the case.

“We had to establish a uniform policy for unclassified positions,” said Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez, who was city manager in 2002. “She would have been dealt with under that policy.”

Unionized employees, like police officers and firefighters, are protected from the policy by preexisting memorandums of understandings or past practices. For example, attorneys who have represented Miami police officers in criminal cases say city has long placed employees on paid leave while the case plays out.

For fire employees, a 1989 memorandum of understanding (MOU) between the fire union and the city allows firefighters who are charged criminally to be placed on paid leave. However, in most of those cases, Suárez said, employees are reassigned while they await trial, as happened to fire captain Gamaliel Souffrant when he was accused of mortgage fraud last year — charges that were ultimately dismissed.

Arthur, who’d started off as a rank-and-file firefighter but moved into an administrative post more than a decade ago, was not protected by the contract. Arthur was the assistant fire chief overseeing payroll and quality control.

Miami fire chief Maurice Kemp said Arthur could have rolled back to her civil service position and benefit from the contractual rights.

“The Fire Chief does not believe the MOU covered Chief Arthur in her position of Assistant Fire Chief,” Kemp wrote. “However, she also held civil service rollback rights and if exercised she would have been covered by the MOU.”

But Arthur never rolled back, a move which would have signified a pay cut. Arthur, one of the city’s highest-paid employees, took home a yearly salary of more than $184,000, in addition to a $167,000 pension in the city’s deferred retirement program.

“It’s 20-20 hindsight,” said Gimenez, a former Miami fire chief. “She could have been stripped of her executive rank, rolled back to her highest civil service classifications, then the contract promising her protections could have applied.”