Employees calling in sick for Super Bowl cost taxpayers $280,000

A Blackhawks Stanley Cup victory would be great for Chicago fans, but would it be good for taxpayers?

Maybe not, if Super Bowl Sunday is any indication.

More than 1,500 jail guards, patrol officers, court security officers and other sheriff's office employees across Cook and the five collar counties called in sick when the New England Patriots beat the Seattle Seahawks on Feb. 1 and on the following day, a Daily Herald analysis of attendance records shows.

The final bill for all the overtime-related costs on those days came to more than $280,000, according to the analysis.

Most of those Super Bowl-related overtime costs came from Cook County, which had to pay out $241,260 in overtime to 766 deputies when 1,309 others took the day off.

“We're not going to run out to Officer X's house to see if he's really sick,” said Cara Smith, chief strategist at the Cook County sheriff's office. “We have very limited tools.”

Smith said sheriff's office employees who have depleted their sick days or show a pattern of being “sick in connection with their regular time off” would “fall very low” on the sheriff's promotion list.

Calls to the Teamsters Local 700, which represents most Cook County jail employees, were not returned.

While most officials note the area was hit by a blizzard later on Super Bowl Sunday that dropped several feet of snow, Smith said many employees who took the day off called in before a flake hit the ground.

“I would hope public employees, especially in positions of public safety, would recognize some days we get the days off we want and sometimes we don't and still the job needs to be done and people need to be protected,” said Madeleine Doubek, chief operating officer of Chicago-based Reboot Illinois, a voter-advocacy digital media group.

“A quarter of a million dollars so that people can stay home and, let's be frank, watch a football game and a bunch of ads is unacceptable.”

Most of the overtime costs were paid out in cash at time and a half, but some deputies chose compensatory time, or “comp time.” That means they get to take time and a half off their regular shifts some time in the future. So, if they covered an eight-hour shift, they would receive 12 hours off.

Government finance experts said the practice of comp time can wind up costing taxpayers more in the long run. That's because someone has to fill those 12 hours and most likely that person will get paid overtime, which amounts to 18 hours of pay to cover the original eight-hour shift.

“Using comp time to fill staffing gaps is using the wrong tool for the job,” said Jesse Hathaway, a research fellow at the Heartland Institute, a nonprofit business and government analytics group based in Chicago.

“It should be used for irregular or occasional overtime work, and these agencies should work to find the root cause instead of applying a bandage.”

Because most law enforcement union contracts offer overtime work based on seniority, the person filling in often has a higher salary than the person being covered.

That's what happened in McHenry County for one sheriff's deputy who called in sick the day after the Super Bowl. Taxpayers spent more than $530 on overtime paid to two veteran deputies to cover the eight-hour shift that would have otherwise cost about $245.

Will County paid out $19,065 in overtime to 80 sheriff's office employees on Super Bowl Sunday and the next day, when 94 employees were out.

Deputy Chief Jerry Nudera said many of those who used sick days did so because of the storm, but others gave no excuse.

There is no requirement for an employee to explain why he or she is taking a sick day, he said.

“Perhaps when it comes to days like this, there should be some extra accountability when they have a problem with call-outs that smell fishy,” Hathaway said. “Maybe it's as simple as having a policy requiring a doctor's note.”

State agencies have a similar problem. Gov. Bruce Rauner sent out a news release in April detailing how more than 1,000 Illinois Department of Corrections employees called in sick on Super Bowl Sunday, costing taxpayers “an additional $325,000” in overtime wages.

It's not just a problem with the Super Bowl. Last month, a Chicago Sun-Times investigation showed 637 jail guards in Cook County called in sick the day of the Floyd Mayweather-Manny Pacquiao fight, more than twice the amount of other recent weekends.

DuPage County Sheriff John Zaruba was the only suburban sheriff to report no overtime costs associated with sick days on Feb. 1 and Feb. 2.

The DuPage County jail is also the only nonunion jail of the six county sheriff departments.

Zaruba's office reported 21 absences on Super Bowl Sunday and the following Monday. DuPage paid more than $2,800 in overtime or comp time to 10 sheriff's office employees during those two days, according to county employment records.

But Kent Kouba, the records division supervisor at the DuPage County sheriff's office, said those were planned.

“It was requested or volunteered overtime,” Kouba said. “It wasn't because someone called in sick.”

In Lake County, 42 sheriff's office employees received $13,126 in overtime and comp time, but only 32 people called off those two days.

Doug Larsson, chief of administration at the sheriff's office, said the department was already short-staffed and some of the overtime was scheduled to maintain “minimum staffing levels.”

Smith said Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart is taking steps to reduce abuse of sick time, but there is a limit to what can be done.

“We have union agreements that govern how we discipline and how we investigate,” she said. “We, just like any jail our size, have overtime issues.

“We have taken a number of steps over the past year to deal with this. One of the ways we've tried to deal with this is raise morale and show we are grateful for the work they do and understand what a difficult job they have, but we need them to come to work.”

Smith said despite the uproar over the Blackhawks chase of the Stanley Cup, so far, “we have not seen spikes in our call-outs and overtime.”

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Contact Jake at jgriffin@dailyherald.com or (847) 427-4602.