Overtime is a budgeted appropriation which allows the Sheriff flexibility to manage his department's 3,000 employees twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Deputies provide law enforcement services to more than 750,000 people who reside in the unincorporated area of the county and the nine contract cities. They also provide security and maintain a constant vigilance over 5,500 inmates at the seven detention facilities.
Overtime is used to maintain minimum staffing levels, called "Post Positions" at the seven detention facilities and the Sheriff's seven patrol stations, four substations, and rural law enforcement offices. A Post Position is one that must be manned 24 hours per day, 365 days per year. Overtime is also used to provide emergency assistance under extreme circumstances such as the 1991 De Luz flooding, the recent Harmony Grove fires, and the Heaven's Gate death investigation.
Overtime appropriations for Fiscal Year 1996/97 are $6.8 million, however expenditures are projected to be approximately $13.9 million. While this creates a deficit in the overtime account of $7.1 million, we have worked hard to control spending and maximize revenues in other areas of the department. Consequently, we expect to finish the fiscal year with a $94,000 surplus. While these unanticipated revenues help us balance our budget this year, we cannot rely on these revenues to bail us out in future years. Moreover, these unanticipated revenues could be used for one time expenses like equipment and facility replacement costs.
Overtime is generally used for vacation/sick relief, to fill vacant "post positions" and to fund other kinks of overtime, such as that required to staff holidays, extended shifts, and special details. Relief overtime accounts for fifty percent of all department overtime worked. The "other" categories account for forty-two percent of all department overtime worked, and the major type of "other" overtime is holiday premium pay. Vacant position overtime accounts for eight percent of the total department overtime worked.
We have viewed our overtime in general expenditures versus those of other counties including Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, Ventura, and Alameda. The average overtime appropriation as a percentage of salaries was 8.6 percent. Our budgeted appropriation was 6.1 percent. On the actual expendure side, the average was 11.00 percent while ours is 12.5 percent.
When a percentage of the past five fiscal years of our budget is annualized, we see that the actual percentage of appropriations has shrunk from 6.8 percent to 6.1 percent while expenditures have ranged from 12.4 percent to 14 percent.
The data shows that we compare favorably with these other counties. However, overtime appropriations have been significantly lower than expenditures for several years. In recent years, department growth and employee salary increases have caused the gap between appropriations and expenditures to widen.
We have worked to control the expenditure of overtime through implementation of a number of department-wide directives or general orders. These directives are: Directive #9512-01 (overtime staffing), which emphasizes replacing overtime replacements with a similar class of employee; Directive #9512-02 (Backfilling vacant positions with administrative staff), which directs facilities to utilize their administrative staff to avoid unnecessary overtime; Directive #9512-03 (mandatory scheduling of 2.5 hours time off), which directs detention facilities to schedule their staff off to avoid paying 2.5 hour overtime each payroll period; Directive #9601-04 (holiday staffing), which directs stations and facilities to work at minimum staffing levels for the holiday; Directive #9601-05 (compensatory time off requests), which requires 14 days advanced notice in accordance with the memorandum of understanding to approve compensatory time off requests; and Directive #9601-06 (minimum staffing - activity/staff ratio), which directs law enforcement managers and supervisors to evaluate their deployment or staff based on calls for service and hour of day.
Other management controls include reviewing of the biweekly Overtime Status Report, by Sheriff's managers, which provides overtime expenditures by category. These reports are generated by the Sheriff's Payroll Information Management System (PIMS). Bureau meetings are scheduled once a month for law enforcement and detention services. At these meetings, recaps of overtime expenditures are discussed to ensure that appropriate managment controls are in place. Each Assistant Sheriff receives a monthly report on overtime within their respective bureaus to ensure appropriate overtime review. Finally, the department's overtime is reviewed by the Sheriff's Budget Oversight Committee and their findings are shared with the Sheriff's Executive Management Team.
As a result of implementing management controls, overtime hours worked by sworn staff has reduced from a high of 197 hours per employee in Fiscal 1994/95 to172 hours in Fiscal Year 1995/96. This reduction occurred in spite of the fact that 78 staff years wre added to the department.
The 12.5 hour shift in the detention facilities increased shift size without adding additional employees. However, the 12.5-hour shift requires the addition of 2.5 hours of additional overtime per employee per pay period or each affected employee must be given a 2.5 hour early release per pay period to prevent that overtime accural. Since the implementation of the Sheriff's Directive 9512-03 (Mandatory Scheduling of 2.5-hours time-off) the amount of overtime within detentions has been reduced by approximately $10,000 per pay period.
The largest area of overtime hours are due to what we will call the "15%" factor. Basically, at any given time roughly 15% of Sheriff's positions are operationally vacant due to employees being off the job on injury leave, on sick leave, in training or a real vacancy is waiting to be filled. In order to answer calls for service and guard the prisoners in the jail, someone must cover these positions on overtime. For instance, on July 1, 1996, a snapshot of the Department was taken and it revealed that 104 employees were either on Total Temporary Disability or Light Duty. This means that they were either off-duty completely, or physically unable to man their "post" position. In addition, 80 were in a training status and we had 39 vacancies waiting to be filled.
In 1996, the Sheriff experimented with the staffing at the South Bay Detention Facility. By filling all authorized positions with actual working employees, and replacing injured workers and vacancies immediately, the actual overtime use dropped dramatically. The same payroll periods for 1996 during the test, and 1995 before the test were compared. The result was a net savings of $77,000 in operational costs. The overtime expenditures dropped from $271,000 to $58,000.
Conclusion: full staffing reduces both overtime and the net operating cost of facilities requiring 24-hour operations.
In order to significantly reduce overtime, we must reduce the number of employees who are being backfilled with overtime. When a deputy sheriff quits or retires, it will be a minimum of 52 weeks before a full replacement is in place. This is due to 31 weeks in the training academy, 2 weeks for additional corrections training, and 19 weeks of "phase" or on-the-job training. This also assumes that the recruitment, testing and screening process can be done in advance. During much of this 52 weeks the vacant line position is being filled by other employees on overtime. To reduce overtime, we need to reduce the 52 weeks for replacement. The solution to this would be to hire ahead, or as previously discussed, create a pool or pipeline of training positions that would be available to fill a newly created vacancy faster. While there are up front costs associated with creating these positions, there will be much less overtime required for replacement.
Another area of potential overtime reduction is in the use of sick leave. Sheriff's employees utilize sick leave at approximately the same rate as the average employee from other county departments. However, absenteeism due to sick leave often creates overtime because, unlike other departments, most positions are required to be filled 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Many employees feel that there is no incentive to "bank" sick leave. In fact it has no value to the employee unless it is used. The solution is to make it more valuable to save, than to use. We are participating with other County Departments and the CAO in studying ways to motivate employees to be more judicious in the use of sick leave. In F/Y 96/97 it is projected that the Sheriff's Department will spend approximately $5.1 million in sick leave and sick relief.
The Sheriff has assigned personnel towork with injured employees and county worker's compensation office to facilitate injured employee's rehabilitation and ultimate return to full duty status. In 1995, injured employees used nearly 32,100 hours of injury leave. That number has decreased to 31,800 hours in 1996. Effective risk management and employee medical laision will further reduce this figure.
Injuries are a problem for all law enforcement agencies. Currently, we have 104 employees on injury status. The average amount of days on injury or light duty status is 10 to 20 working days. To reduce the backfill of these employees, we need to reduce the average days in this status. To do this, we need to expand the Employee Medical Assistance team by one deputy to help speed up the paper work and scheduling of appointments. This will reduce the number of days employees are on injury status, thus reducing the use of overtime to backfill.
Holiday premium pay is predicated upon minimum staffing, taking into consideration the probable activity level for that holiday. For example, July 4th is a holiday that typically requires a large amount of staffing, due to the nature of the way the public tends to celebrate that holiday. Conversely, Christmas and New Years traditionally require a lower staffing level to meet expected service needs. Holiday premium pay is negotiated at the bargaining table. Therefore, the fact that employees receive premium pay for working on a holiday is not preventable by the Sheriff.
While the subject of overtime management is multifaceted, common sense approaches will have a positive impact and reduce the need for overtime.
Concluding Remarks
These measures will ensure we are doing all we can to control hours of overtime. However, the Department controls only the hours, while the budget is done in dollars. The comparisons with other agencies are in percentages of the salary portions of the budget. In addition, the Department needs to continue to be aggressive in Management Controls of overtime hours. The directives have been a productive first step. However, to address the long term solutions we will need help from the Board and the CAO. The Sheriff will cooperate in any way possible to make the proposed action plan a reality.
IMPLEMENTATION TIME
The "Training Pipeline" will be phased in over the next three years. It will consist of 80 positions assigned to Sheriff's Personnel. It is anticipated a mid-year start in FY 97/98 with 80 positions with 22 staff years that will grow to 68 staff years positions by the end of FY 99/00. Estimated cost for FY 97/98 is $850,000. FY 98/99 costs are $2.4 million and FY 99/00 costs are $2.4 million. It is anticipated that implementation of the Training Pipeline will reduce overtime expenditures by $1.8 million per year. The conversion of deputy sheriffs in the detention facilities to corrections deputies will result in an annual savings of another $660,000 in salary and benefit costs. the net effect of funding the training pipeline will be a cessation fo teh escalating need forovertime, as well as a modest reduction (approximately $100,000 per year) in salaries and benefits.
