City Councilman Dave Roberts was not off base two weeks ago when he charged there are certain city employees who have received overtime for every pay period, or almost every pay period, for a number of years. City officials confirmed last week that some city workers have been drawing as much as 30 hours per week of overtime pay routinely. But they took issue with the conclusions that Roberts, who is likely to run for mayor in the spring, has drawn from that fact.
Roberts made his point over and over again at a City Council meeting two weeks ago as he tried to convince a majority of council members not to approve the Russo administration’s payroll request for the two-week period ending Sept. 27.
But while Roberts has said that the repeated overtime is an “abuse,” city administrators said it was actually keeping costs down in the city.
“Overtime is a management tool that is used to increase efficiency,” said City Attorney Bob Murray Thursday. “The point here is that it saves the city’s taxpayers money.”
Murray and other city officials, including Mayor Anthony Russo, met with the Reporter Thursday and opened the city’s payroll books.
To illustrate how overtime is used, Environmental Services Director Tim Calligy pointed to the relatively-new Pier A Park, where city workers are routinely assigned for maintenance. He said that rather than hire more employees to keep up with the city’s increasing population and recreational areas, he can keep the same number of employees, but call them in for extra duty if a situation (like a sunny day or special event) warrants it. “It used to be in Hoboken that if it were a nice day, or a nice weekend, the city would empty out,” said the director. “Now if it’s nice, everybody goes straight to the parks. It’s packed and we know we need people down there. What happens if it rains? We’ve all seen parks employees sitting in the huts in other places with nothing to do. But not here. I can adjust for conditions. Bring people in for overtime on nice days and not have to worry about having a shift with nothing to do on others. It’s just more cost effective.”
There are certain times when paying overtime also provides improved services for the city’s residents, said Calligy. In particular, he pointed to a supervisor of the city’s bus service who routinely logs about 16 hours of overtime a week driving a bus that seniors use to go to the Shop-Rite in Jersey City. While other drivers are used for other city routes, Calligy does his best to ensure that the supervisor is behind the wheel when the seniors go shopping.
“The seniors love this guy,” said Calligy. “He carries their packages for them to the door. We never get a complaint about him. Some people will drop [the seniors] off and not pick them up or do something else crazy. But not him. Its better for everybody is he drives this bus.”
City employees garnering overtime get paid time and a half.
Calligy uses overtime aggressively. In the last pay period – a time that included nice weather and city festivals that require an unusual amount of set-up and clean-up – 30 out of the 60 employees who work in his department claimed some overtime.
Employees who routinely put in for overtime include a pair of Health Department workers, the clerks who man the Thursday evening municipal court, police officers, firefighters, and a clerk who attends the City Council meetings. Sometimes they put in for as few as two or three hours a week, but city employees have been known to claim as much as 30 hours of overtime in one week.
Doesn’t buy it
While the Oct. 18 vote against the payroll is largely symbolic since the money had already been paid out for the Sept. 27 pay period, the issue is likely to have a bearing on the upcoming mayoral elections, scheduled for May of 2001. Mayor Anthony Russo has announced his intention to seek a third term. Roberts is “seriously considering” a bid for City Hall himself. The issue could emerge in a campaign.
“You should have a proper amount of people working a proper amount of time,” said Roberts Thursday afternoon. “They claim that they have 15 people doing the work of 25. I don’t buy it.”
While Roberts says that he is concerned about “the work product” of those that are asked to work sometimes as much as 60 or 70 hours a week, he says that his principal concern is that taxpayer funds might be wasted. As evidence, he pointed to a municipal worker who is charged with cleaning and maintenance in the police station. According to Roberts, this municipal employee routinely puts in for overtime.
“This person is routinely paid three hours of overtime a day,” said the 15-year councilman. “Now if we hired a part-time worker three hours a day and paid him $10 an hour we’d only have to spend a few hundred dollars a week to get the same work done. Over the course of a year we’d spend $12,000 to do this work. Instead they have chosen to pay [tens of thousands of dollars per year] for the same work. They just make these sorts of cavalier, arrogant decisions with no respect for the taxpayer.”
Roberts does not stand alone on this. His political allies, councilmen Tony Soares and Ruben Ramos Jr., also voted “no” on the payroll at the meeting. Councilwoman Rosanne Andreula, who had usually voted with the Russo administration in the past, abstained. Andreula said that her abstention had to do with a lack of police officers at a recent Italian festival.
Soares said Thursday, “We’ve got janitors doubling their salaries with overtime. This is the sort of thing that ’60 Minutes’ would love to sink its teeth into.”
While administrators said that they would not discuss specific cases publicly, they said hiring part-time workers is not easy to do thanks to a city ordinance which requires all municipal employees to live in town.
Business Administrator George Crimmins can tick off a laundry list of secretarial and clerk-type jobs that are open, and have been open for months, in city government.
“We don’t have people beating down our doors for city jobs,” he said Thursday.
Heavy load
Soares would prefer to see less-skilled laborers supplementing the work of their more-skilled supervisors. That might lessen the load that city employees like Geri Fallo, the cultural affairs coordinator, have to carry. Fallo became the subject of controversy at the Oct. 18 meeting when it was revealed that she had put in for 90 hours of overtime over the two-week pay period that the council did not pass.
“Geri Fallo, who does a great job, by the way, should not be out there at the arts and music festival measuring the distance between the vendors’ booths with a measuring tape,” said Soares. “You would not see the cultural affairs director in Manhattan doing that. It would be more cost effective to have someone else do it.”
Beneath the rhetoric about efficiency and saving taxpayer dollars lurks a messier political dispute. While no one denies that some of the people who work overtime are also active politically – generally supporting candidates aligned with Russo and opposed to Roberts – the question of who does what and why is hanging in the air.
Roberts’ allies charge that some municipal workers are allowed to work overtime in exchange for their political allegiance and contributions.
“These people give to the mayor’s campaign, and not just small amounts,” said Soares. “Obviously the administration is using overtime for political gain. Of course, there is some justified overtime. But every city in the country tries to curb it except this one. This administration flaunts it.”
City administrators argued privately that Soares has it backwards. They said that a handful of people who perform overtime are being unfairly targeted by Roberts and his allies because of their allegiance to the mayor. Russo said that the proof that this is a political move on the part of Roberts lay in an analysis of the overall budget scheme. Taxes in Hoboken have been decreased or stabilized every year since 1995. Therefore, Russo said, the city’s fiscal controls must be working well. Overtime, he said, is not an unexpected expense that needs to be shoehorned into the budget. It is accounted for when the budget numbers are drawn up in the beginning of the year. (Since Russo took office in 1993, the council has only had to approve an emergency appropriations request for overtime once, and that was for a snowstorm, his advisers said.)
“So if things are going well, what difference do these little things make to him?” said Russo Thursday. “Taxes are down. The only difference this makes is politics.”
With a City Council meeting scheduled for this Wednesday evening (Nov. 1), city employees will pay particular attention to the next payroll vote. City administrators say that the last vote created a lot of concern around City Hall even though it did not have an impact on their checks. Last week, Crimmins circulated a memo to all city employees explaining what happened and assuring them that “under no circumstances will Mayor Anthony Russo or his administration ask that you return your paychecks.”
Roberts and his allies, who noted that their names were featured in the communiqu