February 10, 2006
Working Overtime for the District
If you're sick of pulling in a measly paycheck that doesn't seem to go very far in the District, you may want to think of a change of careers. And as Fox 5 reported recently in two separate investigative pieces, some of the biggest money may be in the District's government.
According to their investigation, Fox 5 found that government workers putting in overtime may end up costing the city more annually than simply hiring another person to help with the work. In some instances, municipal workers have doubled or tripled their base salaries, putting their final take above that made by the mayor, the chief of police, and the school superintendent. All told, city employees took in $87 million in overtime pay in 2005, led by the Metropolitan Police Department with $36 million, Fire and EMS with $11 million, and D.C. Public Schools with $7.7 million. At those rates, the city could hire an additional 1,100 employees, pay them all $53,000, and still save money. The police department itself could take in 806 new officers at a starting salary of $44,600 and come in under what they spend now on overtime pay.
Curious? Check out D.C. government job openings here.
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I know that cops, teachers, and EMS workers are dedicated to their jobs. No doubt about that. However, if someone is making triple their base salary in overtime one, or all, of the following is likely happening:
1. They are grossly overworked having to put in that much overtime to meet the needs of the city. I don't think any of us want our first responders or teachers working that many hours.
2. There are major staffing efficiency issues.
3. There's outright corruption.
I'm hoping it's more #1 and #2 - not #3.
Remember that a lot of police folk have been required to put in overtime for special events that need more people and coverage because of 9-11. Didn't they have every single officer working during the inauguration and the war and world bank protests? That's a lot of overtime right there.
Not to doubt the conclusions of Fox 5's crack investigative force, but you can't just divide the amount paid out in overtime by the job salary to see how many extra people you could have hired. For one, the nationwide average is that 30% of the employer's cost to hire someone goes to pay for benefits (i.e., if the employer's "cost" to hire someone is $100, then benefits account for 30 and salary accounts for 70).
Nevertheless, it's hard to justify paying so much in overtime pay when a more long-term solution would be better not only for the city's pocketbook, but for the long-term health of the city.
I know for a fact that at DC-DCRA (Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs) they burn up a lot of overtime because of the building-boom related workload. To meet the demand they have a lot of job openings available but since they don't offer true competitive salaries they can't fill the vacant positions which pushes all the work on the existing employees. Because of this they also experience a large burn-out/turnover rate. Why work 60+ hours weekly for the DC Gov't when you can pull in the same or better in 40 hours in the private sector?
I once worked on a project with the planning department and Mayor's office in a Northeastern city and found that a lot of the ridiculous overtime pay is because of the way schedules are structured. For example, the fire department would schedule exactly the number of people they needed to work a given shift. With well over 200 firefighters on duty a day, at least a few were bound to call in sick. When this happened, they would have to bring someone in on overtime rather than planning ahead and building, say, 3 to 5 extra workers into the schedule who would not have to be paid overtime. So its not just an issue of not having enough staff, sometimes its also an issue of not scheduling them efficiently.
The council has been pushing the police to hire more officers for decades. Every year they get a big pile of money to hire 200-500 more officers, and they always miss their targets. And they can't keep up with attrition. If you could make $10-20k more living in Montgomery or Fairfax Countys and NOT get shot at, what would you do?
DCPD needs to make their uniformed jobs more competitive. Either increase salaries, subsidize living expenses, or outright pay for the officers' homes. Whatever happened to that vacant property list?
I have heard form many police officers that much of this overtime is used going to court when people protest their parking tickets. The officer who gave the ticket must show up which if he is getting overtime can cost more than the actual ticket. I have heard of incidents in which officers gave out a number of bogus tickets to get the overtime. I think that it is fair and reasonable for the number of tickets that are fought per officer is monitored as this is money diverted from Schools and much needed infrastructure.
Not sure about the specific levels, but Fire / EMS is probably always going to be overtime heavy - a medical call can take 2 hours including sitting around at the hospital, a real working fire even as much as 4 or 6, and if you're off at 9AM and it comes out at 8:55, well, you have to go...and you really do want coherent shift crews (e.g. rather than having people come in and out at different times) for the sake of cohesion.