The Westbrook Fire Department must hire more staff in order to stem the growing overtime spending situation, Chief Andrew Turcotte told city councilors Monday.
The fire department racked up $581,338 in overtime costs in 2014, which was more than twice what was in the budget. For this year, the department is already 10 percent over budget.
Turcotte told councilors that the department needs either to fill out the roster of per diem firefighters, potentially hire additional full-time daytime employees, or a combination of both.
Currently, overtime is needed any time there are more than two staff members off during a weekday shift, and more than three off on weekends. During his presentation to the Westbrook City Council, Turcotte said there are often situations where two staff members are off during any given shift, and if a third takes a sick day or is out with an injury, that position must be filled by overtime.
Firefighters typically work on shifts of 24 or 12 hours. When one person calls out sick, the entire shift must be covered, increasing the overtime budget quickly. However, Turcotte said, the department “does not have abuse of sick time.”
“The average employee is taking four or five sick days a year,” he said. “But if an employee takes a sick day, and it has to be filled, that’s 24 hours of overtime.”
For the fiscal year 2014-15 budget, the city funded four new full-time positions at the fire department, with the goal to cut down on overtime costs. However, City Administrator Jerre Bryant said the new firefighters have just recently begun regular shifts (after finishing a few months of training) and the city still needs time to evaluate their effect on the overtime budget.
The fire department has 32 full-time firefighters and 16 per diem employees.
The city also recently hired a deputy fire chief, Steve Sloan, who was also on hand for Monday’s presentation.
At a City Council Finance Committee meeting two weeks ago, Bryant laid out overtime expenditures for this year, saying that the city would be using some higher-than-expected revenues to “balance the books.” Those revenues include excise taxes and building permits.
City Councilor John O’Hara, with 18 years on the council, is no stranger to discussing overtime budgets at public safety.
“Where is all the money going that is costing this community a boat load?” he asked. “It’s money that the community could use elsewhere.”
O’Hara added that he realizes the complexity of the issue, and that the fire department is “not a 9-to-5 job.”
“We’re just trying to get a handle on this,” he said.
Bryant said that hiring the additional four employees this year gave the department some leeway, allowing two people to be out before having to utilize overtime. However, he said, injury leave, military leave and sick time often produce the need for overtime.
“We only have one firefighter right now who is off on extended leave,” he said. “But in the past four years, we’ve had times where we’ve had two, three, four or five people out on either work-related injury or non-work related, but they’re not available. That’s when we got into the big numbers that you see in the overtime budget.”
The flexibility of staffing in all public safety departments is addressed in union contracts. The fire department’s collective bargaining agreement requires a minimum of nine employees on duty, and any required training outside an employee’s regular shift must be paid overtime. The average overtime pay is $32 an hour.
The union contract also allows the department to have up to 25 per diem staff members, meaning Westbrook has the flexibility to add a number of per diems to help combat overtime. Turcotte said that due to open per diem shifts in the last 13 months, there has been an average of 20 open shifts per month that the department was unable to fill, resulting in 75 percent of those shifts being filled with overtime – $70,000 of the budget.
On Monday, Turcotte laid out three options the city could utilize in the fiscal year 2015-16 budget. He called the overtime problem a “staffing issue,” and that a balance in overtime could be found with hiring just two additional full-time firefighters. Adding the staff would increase the number of employees who could be out before having to fill a shift with overtime.
“This is the financial balance point between paying that overtime and hiring additional employees,” he said.
According to his analysis, the most cost-effective option would be adding four full-time positions, which could cut the overtime budget down to about $200,000, thus cutting the overall fire department budget by roughly that amount.
Bryant said the “balancing act” of potentially hiring more staff is the cost of those firefighters’ salaries, benefits, uniforms and training.
Michael Foley, the chairman of the Finance Committee, said he believes the committee has cut the overtime budget in past years in an attempt to cut costs, even while the need for those hours was still there. He said he’s hoping Turcotte will bring forward one of his options for next year’s budget.
“I’ve been here 10 years and I’ve never seen a presentation like this,” he said. “I’m confident that he’ll include one of these proposals in his budget that he brings forward to us.”
“Our tasks are only going to grow,” Turcotte said.
The department responded to 3,561 calls in 2014, and is on pace to field 3,700 responses this year.
Turcotte said the issue of overtime costs is not isolated to Westbrook, with neighboring Portland and South Portland also consistently dealing with finding a balance.
City Councilor Mike Sanphy said Monday that, following a study on its overtime costs, Portland decided to hire additional full-time employees to cut overtime.
“As crazy as it sounds, they said ‘hire more people,’ so I think that’s probably the way to go,” he said.
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