Special Board of Aldermen Public Hearing Page 26
152 FIRE DEPARTMENT
Christina McKinley
This is probably both police and fire. | don’t know. | can’t turn pages fast enough. For overtime is
anybody looking into whether — this looks like if I’m reading this correctly over $1 million. Is that
correct in overtime? | don’t know how that gets determined. It seems as though if we’re doing that
much overtime and maybe that’s true for fire as well, | don’t know, would it make sense to just hire
somebody so we eliminate overtime. Just my question is how is that calculated and is someone
looking into whether or not it would make more sense to just hire somebody so that you reduce that.
| assume that the overtime is at a higher costs. Just a question.
Chief Lavoie
Overtime is contractually mandated depending on the number of hours in a day, the number of hours
in a week. In addition to the standard overtime, within the police department there’s all kinds of
coverage overtime. We only have a set amount of people. We have minimum staffing. Let’s say
whatever number you pick 15, 16 officers on the street and we do a training which we do constantly
training, we need to pull officers from every shift and that causes overtime just for coverage overtime.
In addition to coverage overtime, you have investigative overtime. When a crime happens, it doesn’t
get solved immediately, 20 minutes without commercials on television — that’s not reality. If it’s a
major crime, the detectives literally work 48 straight hours without even going home. In addition to
that to your question, so there’s many reasons to incur over time. There’s training overtime when
you're training. You have travel overtime. You have all kinds of things in a department of our size.
In a department that trains like we do because certainly training helps with liability with the city when
our officers are properly trained.
As far as the difference between overtime and hiring someone full time, you have to include the
benefits. Certainly when you hire somebody, | believe at least $20,000 of every person’s initial hire a
year is benefits. So you talk about is it cheaper to pay overtime or cheaper to hire full time people, it
depends is the answer. You’d certainly would have to look at it but we incur our overtime budget is
right around $1 million and we spend $1.5 million a year. So certainly we’re not even properly funded
on the overtime we have. As far as adding officers, that would be great. | know we're always trying
to do that but certainly you have the benefit cost that in addition to the salary you have to think about.
Often times overtime maybe the most cost effective way to do it.
Christina McKinley
If you divided an officer’s salary into $1 million, that seems like an awful lot of officers. If you added
even just a couple of officers to cover when you're doing some sort of a training, it just seems like
that would be an enormous savings to just add a couple of officers. Maybe I’m missing something.
That’s my question. It just seems as though you could hire an awful lot of police officers for $1 million
a year or at least | presume you could.
Chief Lavoie
Again the number of officers to offset that amount of overtime would be dozens certainly and then
they're outfitting their equipment and all that. As far as the overtime you incur, you can incur — some
weeks we spend $30,000 in overtime in a week. Hirer the officer is to offset that, their training, their
equipment, and things of that sort, you’d have to hire many, many, many officers to offset that. We
certainly would like as many officers as we could possible get but | don’t think that’s really something
we'd be able to get.
