Council Questions Cop Comp Time, Overtime

As Hamden grapples with how to cover tens of millions in debt and pension obligations in its new budget, a few touchy and difficult-to-change budget line items have come under the Legislative Council’s scrutiny: police overtime, extra duty, and comp time.

When an officer in Hamden has to work overtime, he or she has a choice:

• Take overtime pay at 1.5 times regular pay.
• Or take comp time — two paid hours off for every extra hour worked.

Though officers cannot take on regular patrol duties during their comp time, they are allowed to take extra-duty jobs watching over construction sites on Hamden’s roads. That means that in some cases, working one overtime hour can allow officers to make five hours of normal pay in two hours later on.

The Legislative Council questioned Acting Police Chief John Cappiello at a hearing on Tuesday evening about his budget in one of a series of meetings with department heads about the town’s proposed 2019 – 2020 operating budget.

While many questions focused on Mayor Curt Leng’s proposal for two new school resource officers, a few dived into the weeds of police pay structures, a complex subject.

Police overtime and extra duty pay account for around $3 million in the mayor’s proposed budget. While certain items fall fully under the jurisdiction of the council, those that are determined by union contracts are difficult to touch. Overtime and extra-duty rules are governed by union contracts, meaning the council cannot change the rules that govern them without renegotiating the collective bargaining agreement.

In the next fiscal year, police officer salaries, including overtime and extra duty wages, will account for about 5 percent of Hamden’s operating budget, equivalent to about 3.5 mills.

Hamden, with a proposed 48.73 mill rate, is one of the highest-taxed towns in the state because decades of underfunding its pension plan have led to hundreds of millions of dollars in pension liabilities. In the 2019 – 2020 fiscal year, the town will pay around $40 million in pension obligations and debt.

Though police overtime and extra duty account for only a small portion of the total budget, as the fiscal authority of the town, the Legislative Council is can explore every line item to squeeze out cost savings wherever possible. Some members suggested that overtime, extra duty, and comp are rife with unnecessary expenses.

“Everywhere that is putting an additional burden on the residents should be looked at,” said At-Large Rep. and Majority Leader Cory O’Brien.

Comp Time

O’Brien was the council member who broached the topic of comp time, overtime, and extra duty at Tuesday’s meeting.

If an officer is called in for overtime, he asked, the officer can choose to either take overtime pay or comp time?

Cappiello confirmed that he was correct.

And if the patrol division is below its minimum staffing level, does that mean that other officers must sometimes be called in?

Again, the answer was yes.

That is where O’Brien sees the first problem with comp time. As was negotiated in the current union contract, if an officer chooses to take comp time in exchange for working one hour of overtime, he or she gets two hours paid time off. Yet when one officer takes time off, O’Brien explained, sometimes another has to fill in to meet minimum staffing levels, and that means paying that officer overtime.

The minimum manning requirement is determined by the union contract, and aims to ensure that a safe number of officers are on duty at all times. According to Cappiello, if enough officers decide to take comp time or vacation time during a given shift, it can push the patrol staffing below the minimum requirement, and the department must then call in another officer. He said it’s difficult to determine how much officers taking comp time leads directly to more overtime, but he said it does happen.

The department pays overtime at one and a half times an officer’s normal pay, as is required by federal law. If an officer takes two hours of comp time, that means the department must pay two hours of overtime to the officer filling in, on top of the two hours of comp time that the department is already paying the first officer. Those two hours of comp time, said O’Brien, therefore end up costing the equivalent of five hours of normal pay.

“I understand where their frustration comes from,” said Cappiello, referring to the council. But changes have to come slowly, he argued, because they must be negotiated with the union.

According to Cappiello, there used to be no cap on comp time, but recent contracts have included caps. The current contract stipulates that in the current fiscal year, each officer can take up to 460 hours, or 57.5 work days, of comp time, and 440 hours/55 days in the next fiscal year.

“Is it still very high? Of course it is,” said Cappiello. ​“But it’s a starting point.”

Extra Duty

Then there is the question of extra duty. When a contractor or another town department does work on Hamden’s roads and needs to call in an officer and police car to control traffic, that’s considered extra duty. There are two extra duty line items in the town’s budget: ​“extra duty salaries” and ​“extra duty town projects.” The former refers to when contractors need police assistance, and the latter is when other town departments, such as public works, require it.

Extra duty differs from overtime in that it is administered by the union. Officers fill out a form with the times they will be available for extra duty. When the department gets a call from a contractor or another town department requesting police presence, the union contacts officers who have indicated that they are available, in order of seniority.

When officers work extra duty for contractors, they are paid at one and a half times the regular rate of an AIII patrol officer, no matter the rank of the officer working the extra duty. While the department pays the officer directly, the contractor reimburses the department for that pay with a 25 percent markup.

The mayor’s proposed budget includes $2 million in the extra duty line item. Because of the 25 percent markup, it includes $2.5 million in revenue from contractors for extra duty.

When officers work extra duty on town projects, they are paid at time and a half of their own regular salary. That is, pay for extra duty on town projects is the same as overtime pay. Since the entity requesting the police officer is another town department, that pay simply comes out of the police department’s operating budget, without reimbursement from the other department. The mayor’s budget proposal funds the town extra duty line item at $175,000.

When officers take comp time, they cannot then take on regular patrol work, but they can use that time to work extra duty jobs. As O’Brien explained after Tuesday’s meeting, if an officer does so, the town must pay 2.5 times what the officer would normally make for the comp time hours — the normal rate of pay plus time and a half for extra duty.

Cappiello said he does not know how often officers work extra duty during comp time, yet he acknowledged that it does happen.

Many, even most officers probably take comp time off to spend with family, said O’Brien. ​“The point of comp time is to have a day off, not so you can go work another overtime job,” he said.

Yet the collective bargaining contract includes no stipulation against using comp time for extra duty. ​“The people in the collective bargaining agreement,” said Cappiello, ​“are abiding by the four corners of the contract.”

It would be difficult to prevent officers from using comp time to take on extra-duty jobs, argued Hamden Police Union President Kevin Samperi. ​“We wouldn’t be able to tell officers that they can’t use an extra duty job,” he said. ​“It’s their day off and if they choose to work an extra duty job they can.”

When officers use comp time to work a town extra duty job, that costs the town directly 2.5 times the cost of a regular salary for those hours. When officers work regular extra duty jobs during comp time — that is, for outside contractors — their extra duty pay is reimbursed, with the markup, by the contractor.

Some argue that extra duty makes the town money because of the 25 percent markup. If the budget projections hold, Hamden will net $500,000 in the next fiscal year from extra duty reimbursements from contractors.

O’Brien cautioned against assuming extra duty actually earns the town extra money.

“My main argument is that there’s a misconception that the town is making money off of these jobs,” he told the Independent.

He used United Illuminating, which provides the town’s electricity, as an example. When UI does maintenance work and requests an extra duty officer to control traffic, the 25 percent markup costs UI extra, he said. That extra cost to UI comes right back to residents in the form of higher rates.

“The company that is paying these fees, they’re not going to take a loss on this. Whatever their cost is, they’re going to pass along that cost to consumers,” he said. He called it a ​“pass-through tax to residents.”

It is unlikely that the council will find a way to save on overtime and extra duty expenses during the budget process because those expenses are governed by the union contract. All the council can do is lower allotments for those line items in the budget it approves, putting pressure on the department to save. Yet if the department is unable to come up with those savings, it could result in a budget shortfall at the end of the fiscal year.

As the police union is in the middle of a long-term contract, changes to the rules that govern pay will likely have to come in the form of union concessions, another contentious practice in Hamden politics. According to Leng and Samperi the police union is close to coming to the council with a concessions package that would include a reduction in total comp time hours.