Police Chief Jeff Miller responds to critics of the city’s
method for tracking officers’ overtime.
HOLLISTER
The Hollister Police Department has faced some critics in these tough budget times accusing the agency of improperly tracking officers’ overtime, but Chief Jeff Miller says it is, indeed, being reported and categorized.
The problem right now, Miller says, is not the actual tracking of overtime and how it’s getting spent, but that there’s no database comprising the information and breaking it down to show where the dollars are going.
Miller says that since becoming the chief, he has pushed for further tracking of overtime to keep expenses down and he adds that the police department usually stays within its budget. After recently asking a sergeant and two supervisors whether they are coding overtime, Miller says they all confirmed they were and one pointed out where the overtime matrix was kept.
The department, he notes, uses a code matrix for all overtime expenditures. The matrix includes 34 overtime expenditures codes that range from vacation replacement to a city-paid special event. Also included are overtime codes for inactive programs that could or will be active in the future. An example, he says, is for the crime prevention assistance code, which is inactive but will be restored next year.
Miller acknowledges, however, that if records requests came in asking how overtime is spent, he would have to hire someone to compile the results.
City Manager Clint Quilter agrees with Miller that overtime is being properly recorded.
“Chief Miller has them report specifically of what they are doing,” says Quilter, adding that there’s “just no one to analyze or put it into a database.”
Miller says a possible solution to the lack of compiled statistics would be if a college student wanted to crunch the numbers or design a program to compile the figures as a school project. He says he would like to hire someone to crunch the numbers, but with the budget as thin as it is, it would be difficult to do.
