Overtime elevates police pay

Another in a series of occasional articles on how much Globe West communities pay their employees.

The median take-home pay for a Weston police officer in 2004 was $85,799, more than $25,000 a year greater than the median pay for firefighters and teachers in the town, according to a Globe analysis of Weston payroll records.

The difference is overtime pay and detail work: Weston reports that it paid its 27 unionized police officers 6,605 hours of overtime in 2004, an average of 4.7 hours a week per officer; and 7,444 hours in detail pay for working at construction sites and events, an average of 5.3 hours per officer.

Nine of the top 20 earners among town employees last year were police officers. Ten were school department employees, including the superintendent, two assistant superintendents, four principals, and the athletic director.

Superintendent Alan Cliff was the highest-paid employee, receiving $149,000 in 2004. The only town employee in the top 20 who did not work for the police or school departments was former town manager Carl Valente, who received $127,000 in 2004 and resigned in May to become town manager in Lexington.

No one at the Weston Fire Department -- including Chief Edmund Walker, who received $88,000 in 2004 -- was among the top 20.

Police officers, in addition to detail and overtime work, can increase their base pay by up to 30 percent by completing college courses and attaining degrees in law enforcement under a state law passed in 1970 known as the Quinn Bill.

''Police overtime has historically been a problem," said the chairman of the Board of Selectmen, Douglas P. Gillespie, ''and it will never be totally controlled because in a small department, when someone is out, you need to replace them overtime. You can't hire a temp."

Phone calls to the three police officers who worked the most extra hours -- Officer Francis Hines, Sergeant Vincent Corcoran, and Officer Dale Muldoon -- were not returned.

Town officials said they have begun to rein in police overtime costs by putting the officer who worked as a detective and the traffic safety officer back on regular patrol. In addition, the police plan to hire a fifth sergeant this year.

Police Chief Steven Shaw said his department this year began scheduling one extra officer above the minimum number required on the day shift and the 3-11 p.m. shift so that if one officer calls in sick or takes a vacation day, the department still can put the required number of police officers on the streets.

''We're not just concerned with eight-hour days," Shaw said. ''We work 24 hours. Take the staffing problems of any eight-hour-a-day business and multiply that by three."

Gillespie said simply hiring more officers wouldn't solve the overtime problem.

''We don't have the luxury in our current collective-bargaining agreement to bring in spare officers and move them around from shift to shift," he said. ''People want to know what hours they'll be working. They want to have lives."

Shaw said his department and the town need to ''strike a balance between the cost of hiring new officers and the cost of overtime."

''Town Hall isn't just concerned with having a body here; they have to be concerned with the add-ons," such as healthcare coverage and other benefits.

Acting Town Manager Donna VanderClock said one of the biggest obstacles to hiring more police officers -- or town employees in any department -- is the soaring cost of healthcare benefits.

Weston pays 90 percent of its employees' health insurance costs, and those costs have increased by 18 percent in the past year and 62 percent in the past three years, she said.

Health insurance is ''eating up almost all our room for increases under the Proposition 2 1/2 [tax limiting] cap," she said.

With the large amounts of overtime and details worked by police officers, town officials worry the officers may be working so many hours that they show up for their regular shifts exhausted.

''If an officer happens to be on the night shift," Gillespie said, ''then he has the potential to work unlimited details during the day."

Shaw said the contract with the police union stipulates that an officer may work no more than 16 1/2 hours in any 24-hour period.

Overtime is assigned on a rotating basis, according to Shaw, with the officer who has the fewest overtime hours given the first choice of an overtime shift.

Another clause of the town's collective-bargaining agreement requires that police officers brought in for overtime or details be paid for a minimum of four hours, even if they work for only a half-hour. If an officer works more than five hours of overtime, he or she must be paid for a full eight-hour shift.

''It's like that in every police department around here," the police chief said. ''An officer might get paid for an eight-hour detail but only work five, six hours."

Road construction contractors, utilities, and other private organizations pay the town for the hours of detail work plus a 10 percent administrative fee, according to VanderClock.

Phineas Baxandall, assistant director of the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, said large amounts of overtime paid by municipal governments can been seen as ''an indicator that things weren't working the way they should."

''Certainly citizens want to feel their police officers are well trained and well paid, unlike, say, Louisiana, where police take second jobs as security guards and the low pay increases the possibility of corruption. But there seems to be a threshold."