 |
||||||||
 |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
Sheriff's Office to curtail overtime
By RYAN DAVIS, Times Staff Writer The Pasco County Sheriff's Office has nearly run out of money to pay its employees overtime for the next three months. Any employee who might work overtime has been asked to sign a form stating that he or she will accept time-and-a-half compensation time in place of overtime pay. Employees who don't sign the form won't work any overtime, said Col. Al Nienhuis, the undersheriff. He said the temporary order, which was issued Aug. 7, won't affect public safety. "We will never have that situation," Nienhuis said, "where we are in the middle of a murder investigation and we say, "Oh, we have to go now.' " He said the agency has always encouraged supervisors to eliminate overtime by giving their employees time off during the same pay period. This order takes that unwritten rule a step further, he said. Sheriff's spokesman Kevin Doll said the agency does not have a list of employees who refused to sign the order. Sheriff Bob White ran for office two years ago with the plan to put more deputies on the road. During the two-week pay period before the order, the Sheriff's Office paid $82,794 in overtime. That's more than double the budgeted amount, but it was unclear how many hours it paid for, Doll said. Officials expect overtime pay to be close to zero for the last period, Doll said. "We still have more deputies on the street than this county has ever had," What about staffing levels when people start to cash in their comp time? "That is so far in the future. Right now, we'll get through this, and we'll evaluate where we're going to be," Nienhuis said. The budget crunch arose, Nienhuis said, because of health insurance costs. The agency became self-insured a little more than three years ago. The county budget provides for a payment to the Sheriff's Office each month for insurance costs. The agency has backlogged medical bills from several unexpected and "catastrophic" injuries, so over the next three months, the county's payments won't be enough, Nienhuis said. He said there's no way the agency could have planned to avoid the tightening. "Unfortunately, we can never tell when it comes to medical claims how much they're going to be," he said. The only way to make up for the insurance shortfall, Nienhuis said, is to take money from another pool within the salary segment of the budget. Overtime money is the best option, he said. The sheriff's legal department told White's command staff to get signatures on the order in compliance with the Fair Labor Standards Act. Deputies typically accumulate overtime when they attend court and investigations at the State Attorney's Office outside their shifts. Detectives accumulate overtime when they work nearly all day for several consecutive days after a homicide. A body was discovered Aug. 1 and the major crimes unit accumulated nearly $10,000 overtime for the pay period ending Aug. 4. At the county jail, corrections officers had been accumulating overtime to cover vacancies. Deputies at the jail in Land O'Lakes accounted for more than 40 percent of all agency overtime during the last pay period before the order. Nienhuis said he didn't know whether the agency's health insurance premiums will climb or whether the agency might ask the county for more money. -- Ryan Davis is the police reporter in Pasco County. He can be reached in west Pasco at 869-6245, or toll-free at 1-800-333-7505, ext. 6245. His e-mail address is rdavis@sptimes.com.
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
490 First Avenue South • St. Petersburg, FL 33701 • 727-893-8111 
|
From today's Pasco Times Letters |
