By Marcia Gelbart
The Philadelphia Inquirer
PHIALDELPHIA — Overtime pay has slipped away at Philadelphia municipal agencis in the last few years — except at the Sheriff’s Office, where last year, overtime dollars accounted for 23 percent of the payroll.
By contrast, the Police Department devoted 9 percent of its payroll to overtime, and the Fire Department 11 percent. The total at prisons — the city’s most understaffed department — was 19 percent for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2010, according to an Inquirer analysis of city payroll data.
In all last year, 19 sheriff’s employees, whose base salaries ranged from $47,000 to $64,000, received more than $30,000 each in overtime. Many earned the money working long hours in short-staffed units.
Nonetheless, the high overtime costs — expenses climbed $400,000 from 2007 to 2010 — have undercut the Nutter administration’s efforts to make overtime reduction a budget priority as the recession has slashed city revenues.
The growing costs also reflect longtime concerns about the extent and quality of financial oversight in the Sheriff’s Office, an agency some believe should be eliminated.
Led for 23 years by John D. Green, an elected official, the Sheriff’s Office is one of three row offices that operate independently of the mayor’s purview. (A fourth, the Clerk of Quarter Sessions Office, was abolished last Tuesday.)
The office, which had 230 employees last year, is responsible for transporting prisoners to and from court, providing courtroom security, serving legal papers, enforcing evictions, and handling sheriff’s sales.
Sheriff’s officials attributed the high overtime costs to several factors, including steady growth in the prison population — which means more inmates for deputies to bus into Center City courtrooms and, in turn, busier courtrooms to monitor as judges’ caseloads grew.
“We’ve never lost an inmate, we’ve never had a judge get hurt,” Chief Deputy Sheriff Barbara Deeley said. She is expected to succeed Green after he retires Oct. 31.
She also emphasized that overtime was court-generated. “You can’t tell a judge, ‘OK, it’s 5 p.m. You have to get off the bench.’ ”
While the average daily jail count peaked at about 9,800 in early 2009, it has fallen nearly every month since then. Overtime has not.
Deeley said that is in part because of staff shortages, with positions left vacant to save money. The office is down 15 people, mostly deputy sheriffs, she said.
Nonetheless, overtime began dropping in May, with Deeley having enacted new policies and practices after discussions with city Finance Director Rob Dubow, judges, and other criminal-justice officials. With fewer deputies assigned to Family Court and more deputies working on staggered schedules to accommodate judges’ hours, overtime expenses are running about $50,000 to $100,000 less a month than in the last fiscal year.
“We are working together, and I am doing the best I can,” Deeley said.
Just last year, the Pennsylvania Intergovernmental Cooperation Authority, which monitors Philadelphia’s spending, issued a report highlighting the office’s poor accounting procedures - issues raised in past city and state audits. In 2005, for instance, a state treasurer’s report said sloppy records made it nearly impossible to determine the source of $11 million in unclaimed money at the Sheriff’s Office.
The authority’s report recommended that the Sheriff’s Office, as well as the other row offices, be dismantled to save money, with functions transferred to other departments.
In June, Councilmen Bill Green and Frank DiCicco cosponsored a bill that would do that, but it has little support and is unlikely to make any headway.
Mayor Nutter said that while he does not think the Sheriff’s Office needs to be led by an elected official, creating an alternative structure could take years because of the diverse functions carried out by the office. “It’s a large, complicated operation,” Nutter said.
At the same time, the mayor voiced frustration with the office’s failure, until recently, to trim overtime.
Last year, despite several warnings from the city budget director, the Sheriff’s Office spent $2 million more than budgeted because of overtime.
Overall, sheriff’s employees in the last few years have collected more in actual overtime dollars than most other city workers.
Police officers, for example, earned an average of $6,042 each in overtime last year, compared with an average of $14,303 for sheriff’s employees.
The vast majority of the extra dollars went to deputies in supervisory positions. For example, four of the top 10 overtime-earners in the last three years are deputy sheriff captains.
Two of them, Albert Innaurato and Peter Lavini, each pulled in nearly $50,000 in overtime in 2010, adding to their base salaries of $63,600.
Innaurato, a 30-year employee, heads the civil processing unit, and oversees deputies responsible for posting notices at homes facing sheriff’s sales and serving writs such as court-ordered eviction notices. The work, he noted, is time-sensitive because of court-ordered deadlines.
He and other supervisors also fill rotating building-security shifts at city courthouses, which is overtime.
Time sheets show Innaurato often received about 100 hours of overtime pay a month, frequently for working four extra hours a day.
“I have one kid in high school and another in college, and I’m just trying to get my bills paid and stay afloat,” he said in an interview.
Innaurato also said he often shared the work of his deputies - posting eviction notices, for instance - because of both the surge in sheriff’s sales and his unit’s reduction over the years from 10 deputies to four. “When we had more deputies, we did five or six evictions a day; now we are down to one or two,” he said.
Lavini is a captain overseeing the Traffic Court, where deputies operate metal detectors and provide security building-wide, including for prisoners and judges. Overtime enhanced his 2009 paycheck by $47,890, making him the top overtime-earner that year. In 2008, the extra hours bumped up his salary by $51,738.
Lavini, who did not return a call, earned significant overtime because Traffic Court operates at night as well.
But not all the fattest overtime checks went to supervisors who oversee rank-and-file deputies.
Indeed, the biggest overtime-earner in any of the last three years was Darrell Stewart, director of real estate and the office’s mortgage-foreclosure-prevention program.
In 2008, Stewart more than doubled his take-home pay, earning $55,576 on top of his base salary of $40,588. He did nearly the same thing the following year, earning $40,317 in overtime above his base salary of $40,788.
A review of his time sheets shows Stewart worked an extraordinary number of hours and days. Between February and June 2008, for example, records indicate he worked all but four days - including both days, usually for eight hours a day, every weekend.
At that time, the recession had prompted a surge in foreclosures, with nearly 200 homes a month being auctioned by the Sheriff’s Office. This was also when the city implemented its nationally recognized foreclosure-prevention program, which requires mortgage companies to meet with homeowners before a sheriff’s sale can occur.
Deeley said that Stewart, who declined comment for this article, organized neighborhood outreach seminars to educate homeowners about the program. “He took a proactive approach to help them try to save their homes,” she said.
With the tide of foreclosures slowing in 2010, Stewart’s overtime dropped as well. Records show he earned just under $30,000.
Other sheriff’s employees also collected significant overtime, especially relative to their salaries.
Crystal Green, a payment processing clerk, earned $34,267 in regular pay in 2009 and 2010 — and $21,872 and $26,758, respectively, in overtime. Time sheets show her extra earnings came mostly from working at least six hours most Saturdays, and four hours on weekdays.
Green, not related to Sheriff Green, did not return a call seeking comment. Deeley said her long overtime hours are due to her role as cashier at sheriff’s sales, which she attended on Saturdays, returning afterward to her office to count the money collected. “She is a one-woman show,” Deeley said, noting that a former employee who also did that work was not replaced when she retired.
Even so, Green’s Saturday work was recently eliminated to save money, she added.
“Due to the budget crunch, she only works during the week,” Deeley said. “We are trying to cooperate with the mayor on cutting back on overtime.”
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