Overtime in Municipalities

Hi Everyone:

Today's blog is about an astounding fact that I have been recently reading about in my local newspaper. In almost every municipality in Westchester and Putnam Counties, in New York State, the top wage earners are not the elected or salaried people, but hourly employees who are eligible for overtime. I was dumbfounded to learn that there are Police Officers and other municipality employees who made up to $150,000 during the last fiscal year. It was not just one person in a given department, there were numerous people in the same department who made well over $125,000. Those are astronomical amounts.

Now don't get me wrong, I believe in the necessity of Police Officers and the other departments that help to give all the services needed to have a safe, clean and effective municipality. But it is painfully obvious that the upper management in the departments as well as the elected officials do not know how to effectively run them. It is also painfully obvious that again, politicians have zero common sense.

Why? If any business had numerous employees in a given department making such incredible amounts of overtime, that doubles their regular pay, year after year, there is a common sense solution to solve this problem. A company would hire X amount of either full time and/or part time employees to relieve the overtime. The part time employees would not cost the company any additional money for benefits and the full time new hires benefit costs would have to be taken into consideration so as to not incur more money then the total overtime costs. How simple is that solution? You would think someone would implement that plan.

Of course there is always a wrench that is thrown into this overtime mess. That wrench is the unions that these employees belong to. When an union employee retires, their last three years of their pay prior to retirement date are averaged to determine what their yearly pension will be. That in itself is a costly problem due to the fact that three years before an employee retires they volunteer for the most amount of overtime that they can get. I personally believe that a different equation should be used to determine what the yearly pension amount should be. Of course that would have to be negotiated with the unions, which would be a very daunting task. Why? The unions would stand on past practices and that's that, period. When a lot of these employees retire after 20 years or at age 55 yes 55, they go on to another career. Then they get their new salary from their new job and they also receive their pension. So, to get around the sticking point of fruitlessly trying to negotiate with the unions, all that needs to be done is to hire more employees to cut the overtime. A simple solution that does not have to be negotiated.

You would think that politicians should know that running a municipality is very similar to running a business and overtime costs are overtime costs and they need to be controlled. Again, politicians need to learn about common sense and how to use it.

Till next week.