QUESTION
How can the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) better budget for uniformed officers' overtime?
4:27:46
·
74 sec
New York City Comptroller Brad Lander suggests improving overtime budgeting by scheduling on-duty staff for planned events.
- Lander highlights excessive overtime for planned events as a key issue.
- Recommends staffing on-duty personnel for known large-scale events to avoid overtime costs.
- Identifies that a significant portion of overtime expenses comes from planned events such as parades.
- Suggests a more proactive approach to scheduling could significantly reduce overtime expenditures.
Selvena N. Brooks-Powers
4:27:46
You wrote in a report last year that police overtime remains by far the largest overtime category and the most likely to far outstrip its budget.
4:27:57
Yet there have been yet they have not been serious efforts either to rein in this spending or to more honestly reflect expectations in the budget.
4:28:08
Can you talk about what steps ONB could and should take to be more appropriately budgeting for overtime among uniform offices?
Brad Lander
4:28:17
So the thing we looked at in that report that really struck out stuck out to me, the most was how much overtime there was on planned events.
4:28:24
Obviously, one understands over time for an unplanned event, something, you know, there's a, you know, a protest or a disaster, then, of course, you're gonna assign people over time, but a pretty substantial number of planned events of parades and large scale events that are known in advance involved a significant amount of overtime, and that seemed to me to be one area where you could just say, look, we know this event is coming.
4:28:49
We're gonna staff it with folks who are on duty at that shift so that we don't have to pay overtime costs.
4:28:57
So that would be one particular place that we would recommend.