New Haven Independent

The official numbers came in the mayor’s August financial report approved by the aldermanic Finance Committee last week.

In July and August, the police department used about $1.2 million of its $2.5 million overtime budget. That’s 47 percent of the budget, in just the first two months of FY07-08.

The fire department wasn’t doing so much better. In the first two months of the year, the fire department soaked up 33 percent of its allotment for the fiscal year, spending 0.8 million of a $2.3 million budget.

Why all the overage?

Police “have been using a lot of overtime in response to the uptick in shootings that we’ve seen,” responded Chief Administrative Officer Rob Smuts Friday. “There’s been an incredible amount of activity and a lot of concern about criminal activity within the summer months.”

With so many vacancies, the police department reached to overtime to fill regular patrols. Smuts said he expects the overtime rate to “go down significantly” as more cops hit the streets: 16 officers return to patrol on Oct. 22, and 26 rookies will become full officers on Dec. 1.

“Having more officers will make a big difference,” said Smuts. He still expects overtime to exceed its allotted budget for the year, just as “we went over significantly last year, and the year before and the year before that.”

Vacancies — including 27 firefighter positions — are also the main driving force behind overtime in the fire department, said Smuts. Most of the cost will be mitigated by switching funds from the personnel budget, he said — costs should be comparable because firefighters get paid straight time for overtime work, up to 212 hours, so getting another officer to work overtime to cover a hole in a shift shouldn’t drive up total departmental costs.

The fire department has yet to seat a new class. The certified list is ready, but the budget has not been arranged, said Smuts. He said he hopes to seat a new class in the latter half of the fiscal year.

The fire and police chiefs, who had been requested via email to attend the Finance Committee meeting, received an aldermanic rebuke for not being there. In their absence, aldermen approved their reports without discussion.

Also Thursday, the committee adjusted last year’s budget in response to a $1.6 million surplus. The surplus came as a result of unexpected revenue, including $6 million in building fees, said budget director Larry Rusconi. In light of the surplus, aldermen voted unanimously to retroactively raise the bottom line for the FY06-07 budget from $415 million to $422.1 million.

And a new effort toward performance-based budgeting — a way of rethinking departmental costs ahead of time instead of just repeating the budget from last year — kicked off with a discussion on changing city pension plans. The new cost-cutting effort, engineered by Ward 1 Alderman Nick Shalek, came out of the FY07-08 budgeting process.