Wheaton still paying big bucks for police and fire overtime

Injuries and illness have decimated already lean Wheaton police and fire departments, overtime records show.

With six months left in the fiscal year, both departments already have burned through their entire overtime budgets for the year.

In raw dollars, that means the police department spent $190,000 on overtime through the first six months of the fiscal year, which started May 1.

The fire department paid out even more overtime, a total of $550,000 for the same time period.

In some respects, this is old news. Last February, a Daily Herald investigation showed fire department employees worked so much overtime that seven of them made more money than Fire Chief Greg Berk.

Firefighters achieved that feat by earning up to 40 percent of their total yearly pay in overtime.

"The situation at the fire department is, with the limited staffing they have, you're always back-filling," said City manager Don Rose.

In other words, it's cheaper to pay overtime when a shift is short on firefighters than to hire new people and pay the associated benefits. Rose said this is occurring regularly now since one fire department employee has been off the job, on a workman's compensation injury, for the past 13 months.

Likewise, the police department has been down two employees for the entire fiscal year so far. One has health issues. The other is on workman's compensation. Two other police employees have missed a combined total of three months because of injuries.

Deputy Police Chief Tom Meloni said he's proud that the police staff has been more than willing to work additional hours to maintain minimum staffing levels.

The major storm in August, for example, resulted in about 40 hours of overtime responding to calls from residents. Meloni said some of the overtime pay will be offset by absorbing the salaries of officers who've left back into the budget. The department also has brought in six new recruits this fiscal year that will bring down overtime needs once they're ready to fill shifts on their own.

Still, Rose said it's not unreasonable to expect similar overtime costs for both departments for the remaining six months of the fiscal year. That means finding an additional, unbudgeted $740,000 from either reserve funds or under expenditures in other accounts.

City staff already told the city council this week that they're facing a possible $3.2 million deficit for next year's citywide budget.

Factoring into that will be a series of new union contracts the city will ink. Public works and police employees just finalized their new agreement a couple weeks ago. Fire department employees have worked without a contract since May.

It's unclear what impact the new contract may have on the fire department's overtime and staffing issues. For now, Rose said overtime is not a problem.

"Do people get injured and have health issues during the year? Yes, but you don't budget for that," Rose said. "It's not that big of a concern for the moment at least."

What about overworked firefighters?

"That's the key you've got to keep an eye on," Rose said. "I don't think we've reached that point yet."

Fire department administrators didn't respond to requests for comment.