For years, the City of Hollister public safety groups have racked up significant overtime charges, but the city cannot tell the taxpayers where the money has been going because they don’t have a system for tracking the reasons for the charges. It’s more than passing strange that a majority of the city council is eager to charge people for using emergency services, but they have been anything but eager to manage the overtime costs.
According to the information submitted by the city to the California state controller, the 62 total regular employees in the police and fire departments earned $3,933,567 in regular pay in 2013 and $878,485 in overtime pay (22.3 percent of regular salaries for public safety).
There are all kinds of reasons for working overtime; some even make good economic sense given that during the same period the retirement and healthcare costs for public safety exceeded $2.8 million (71.8 percent of the regular public safety payroll). Hiring more help means more retirement and healthcare burden. Additionally, except for prevention, we may have little or no control over emergencies and injuries requiring direct overtime or medical leave.
However, there are also bad reasons for overtime: poor scheduling or manning decisions, inefficient use of personnel, inappropriate assignments, inadequate planning, and so on.
To manage the program the supervisors, department heads, executive staff and Hollister City Council need to have the information detailing why these charges were incurred by category. Overtime cannot just serve as an under-the-counter pay bump. We already have those, and it’s called “other pay” and equaled $303,760 (7.7 percent) of the regular public safety payroll in 2013. This category also needs a look-see.
Gyrating overtime charges that come when management cracks down then forgets about it until the next time they need to crack down again is a sure sign that things are out of control. The city council needs to provide the system and personnel to manage these charges on a priority basis. I guarantee it won’t cost almost $880,000 a year.
Marty Richman, Hollister
