Overtime payments continue to skyrocket among Pittsburgh departments, including fire bureau

CBS News

5 days ago

The city of Pittsburgh's payroll is awash in overtime.
Last week, Pittsburgh City Controller Rachael Heisler reported the city has already spent 77% of the money budgeted for overtime this year and projects it will go $20 million over budget.
Of all city departments, the largest amount of overtime has long been in the Pittsburgh Bureau of Fire, but as KDKA Lead Investigator Andy Sheehan reports, efforts to rein in that overtime have fallen short and may have even backfired.
For years and years, everyone in the fire bureau, except for the chief and two assistants, has been a member of the union.
It is a structure that has long rankled administrations, which complain they can't effectively manage the bureau.
"You can't have a functional bureau with a chief and two assistant chiefs as the only non-union members of the entire fire bureau," Deputy Mayor Jake Pawlak said. "You can't run any institution that way."
The next rank is deputy chief. The city has long had four. Each is a member of the union, and each is eligible for overtime. But while the city has been keen on reining in fire overtime, those deputies have not exactly been management watchdogs.
Instead, they've consistently been among the city's top earners, each making an average of $310,000 a year — nearly tripling their base pay.
So, in the last contract negotiations, the city removed the deputy chiefs from the union, making them ineligible for overtime. But all four then took demotions to the rank of battalion chief so they could still get it.
Meanwhile, fire overtime continues to spin out of control. The city has spent 70 percent of the $16.5 million budgeted for fire overtime and will almost certainly go over budget again this year.
"This move that you were trying to rein in overtime has actually exacerbated the problem?" KDKA's Andy Sheehan asked.
"We expected that that's the course they were going to take when we bargained that," Pawlak said. "It's a long-term investment in the ability of the fire bureau to be responsibly managed."
Pawlak says the city anticipated the move. The contract gave the deputies another year of overtime eligibility before each took the demotion. Three of them retired this spring, and their pension is based on their three highest years of earnings. Only one remains in the rank of battalion chief, and the positions of deputy chief are vacant.
Pawlak said overtime is a stodgy problem, and the city is looking long term, eventually filling the deputy chief positions without having to pay overtime — another example of how reining in overtime is an uphill fight.