Takin’ care of business…

…And working overtime. Guitar!

This Bachman-Turner Overdrive classic rapidly became a quasi-anthem for the nine-to-fiver toeing the line during the 1970s. In later decades, the melody became synonymous with the ‘things are getting done’ montage and Jim Beluishi’s predilection for wearing Hawaiian shirts. Today, city residents might consider humming this tune as they drop off their property tax bills. Maybe even get the clerk to join in for the last refrain. After all, it’s going to take a lot of business to pay up the hundreds of thousands of dollars city workers are slated to receive in overtime.

The $38.2 million city budget proposing a 3.8 percent tax hike also includes roughly $798,000 to pay workers overtime in 2009. This cash will go toward paying everyone from the highway department worker pitching in a few early morning hours to clear snow-choked roads to the cop working an extra eight hours because the department is short staffed. Overtime in the 2009 budget will be haplessly pitched into a slush fund within each department and doled by supervisors on an ‘as needed’ basis. In other words, it will be spent in its entirety and then some.

Now for some of the Spa City’s platinum card-carrying residents, $798,000 might not sound like a big deal. After all, it’s only a fraction of the overall budget. But consider this: If the city were to magically eliminate overtime spending from the general fund altogether and that savings was applied to the $14.3 million tax levy, city residents would see an almost flat budget this year.

What is even more startling is that the proposed allocation for overtime this year is actually pretty good, as compared to what Finance Commissioner Ken Ivins is projecting the city will spend this year. Estimates in the 2009 budget show the city will fork over more than $1.02 million in overtime expenses.

This overtime is broadly spread across departments and ranges from $13,082 earned by city garage personnel to $15,825 afforded to workers at the Weibel Avenue Ice Rink. Tree cutters will garner $3,200 of time-and-a-half pay, while the Finance Department’s ‘data processors’ will net a clean $3,000.

Update: The natives are already restless over the proposed cuts in overtime. Not even a day after this post, business leaders are allegedly calling for a meeting with city officials to see if the overtime cuts might impact the Spa City’s never-ending stream of street festivals. Well here’s a quick answer based in fact: They won’t. But this is the response they’ll probably get from Kim and his new best friend, Public Works Commissioner Skip Scirocco:

“There are no bodies to put out there.”

Well, Skip, they were actually asking about who will help with these events, not where the city might get cadavers for an ultra-realistic Halloween ghoulfest. But now that you mention it, please do explain to us what your “bodies” are doing “out there.” ’Cause when I see them, they’re usually doing a lot of standing around.

But the cake for best wastrel of overtime dollars naturally goes to Ron Kim, whose Department of Public Safety seems to be a veritable black hole of time-and-a-half earners. Take for instance the dispatchers. This year, they are anticipated to earn a jaw-dropping $130,000 in overtime, which is just $32,000 short of what the city firefighters will earn for actually being dispatched to calls. This year, Ivins chopped their allotment to a still-impressive $65,000, which is about $13,000 less than they collected in 2007.

And then there are the patrolmen. Aside from all their other volumes of contracted benefits, the city cops will take home roughly $400,000 in overtime, accounting for more than a third of the extra pay the city will dole out this year. This overtime blasts through the $330,200 the department was originally budgeted in 2008, which was a more than $70,000 increase from what they earned the previous year. Fortunately, Ivins decided to push back a bit, knocking the cops’ budgeted overtime back to $275,000. Still, this is a ludicrous 48 percent increase over what the department was initially afforded in the 2008 budget.

As aforementioned, the firefighters are no slouches themselves when it comes to collecting overtime. Yet the line item for the fire department has remained remarkably static when compared to the police spending over the past two years. The firefighters brought home $143,000 in overtime payments in 2007 and were afforded a modest $24,000 increase in the revised 2008 budget. Unlike their cop counterparts, the firefighters appear to be about $7,000 under their overtime budget this year, a stunning thought considering the rest of the city’s departments generally spent up to their limit and even over in some cases.

The comparison between the firefighters and the police is important to note, seeing as though they both have very dangerous jobs that sometimes result in injury. In the private business world, injury is one of the few excuses employers have for accepting overtime on the payroll. After all, it’s illegal to dismiss an injured employee and filling that space on the short-term basis is difficult to say the least, especially if the position requires months of training.

With this noted, it’s interesting to see the fire department has more-or-less forecast their overtime needs, while the police have almost chronically ignored their budget. Perhaps this is because Chief Ed Moore is spending more time on vacation than he is managing his department. Or perhaps it’s because the Public Safety commissioner is nothing more than a paid shill for the increasingly powerful police union, which just happens to be working out a new contract with the city.

What is even more remarkable is that Kim can piss and moan about his department being on the receiving end of proposed job cuts, when the two agencies he is intrinsically tasked to manage are running roughshod over their overtime budgets. Were he to trim the budgeted overtime by even half, he could hire five full-time workers at $50,000 annually. It’s something conscientious taxpayers should take to the upcoming budget hearings.

The bottom line is the overtime is unacceptable, no matter what department is collecting it. Massive overtime payments are almost always indicative of poor management, whether it’s ensuring enough people are on the job, or more importantly, the right people are on the job. But when the entire budget process gets mired in piddling issues –whether or not to buy a new phone system for City Hall –the larger piece of the pie gets left in the fridge to marinate.