Toronto paid 110 employees more than $20,000 in overtime in 2013
A total of $30.7 million in overtime was paid to nearly 12,000 workers in 2013, pushing many over the $100,000 salary threshold.

thestar.com
Dec. 24, 2014
By Jennifer Pagliaro

More than 100 city employees made more than $20,000 in overtime pay last year.

Of those, nearly all earned more than $100,000 in 2013, in part because of those high payouts.

The city paid a total of $30.7 million in overtime last year. Close to 12,000 city employees received a piece of that, ranging from just 30 cents to more than $78,000, according to city data obtained by the Star.

More than 1,200 of those employees, from across 28 divisions, earned more than $100,000 for the year.

Those overtime figures, say councillors and union officials, may be the unintended consequence of budget cuts under former mayor Rob Ford that forced some senior officials to make unallocated reductions - working with fewer staff but faced with a burgeoning workload due to unprecedented events such as last year’s ice storm.

Councillor Shelley Carroll, who served as budget chair under former mayor David Miller and sits on this term’s budget committee, said some managers try to balance the budget by filling the gap left when employees retire or leave with extra labour from other workers in the department - something that can result in an increase in overtime pay.

“Everybody ends up filling the gap,” Carroll said. “It’s a false economy.”

Toronto Water paid out the most in overtime, with some of it linked to last year’s ice storm. In 2010, city overtime hit $45 million and city managers implemented changes to curtail costs.

For 2013, it’s not clear, in cases where employees’ salaries topped $100,000, what portion of that came from overtime pay, because the city - citing privacy concerns - deleted those figures from records provided to the Star through a freedom of information request.

The city argued the Star could identify those employees by matching their pay to the public Sunshine List - the provincially mandated salary disclosure that names all public servants making more than $100,000 and lists their earnings.

A Star review of Toronto employees on the Sunshine List shows most non-executive workers were making just over $100,000 but less than $200,000.

The city currently employs more than 35,000 full- and part-time staff earning a total of $1.98 billion in 2013.

The division with the most overtime in 2013 was Toronto Water, with $6.76 million in total payouts.

City spokesperson Deborah Blackstone said weather-related incidents are partly responsible for Toronto Water’s overtime hours, including the December 2013 ice storm, which required “significant staff resources” to “help expedite power restoration” at pumping stations and water plants and to repair infrastructure.

The “unseasonably cold” winter also saw 400 more watermain breaks than in 2012, as well as frozen service lines. And the torrential July 2013 rainstorm prompted 4,700 calls involving sewer service line blockages, Blackstone said.

The employee who received the most overtime pay - $78,953 - was a Toronto Fire Services communications centre employee who takes 9-1-1 calls and dispatches emergency vehicles, according to the city.

The employee, who was not identified, is a supervisor whose overtime is “documented and overseen by the deputy and is accrued in accordance with the collective agreement,” said Blackstone. She added that overtime is offered to all communications centre employees, and this particular employee accepts “a large portion” of it.

The same system of voluntary overtime, Blackstone said, is true in the Solid Waste Management division, which had 11 employees who earned more than $20,000 in overtime last year.

She said the reasons for overtime - the division paid out a total of nearly $3.4 million - was meeting service demands, covering staff absences and working through extreme-weather issues.

Both Carroll and Councillor Gord Perks say there is some necessary overtime, including the on-call emergency response across departments for events such as the ice storm.

But Perks said the city has a habit of not filling all of the positions budgeted for each division, and because of poor planning isn’t doing a good enough job of avoiding large overtime payouts.

“Generally speaking, as we cut the number of employees the number of overtime goes up,” Perks said. As managers leave, he said, the positions are often filled from below - continually creating new holes. “I think that’s just bad successive planning.”

Carroll also questioned whether that kind of “random gapping” is really worth the cost in overtime.

“When you do things that way, you’re not really cutting so much as you’re differing,” she said.

In the end, Carroll said, it’s the public that suffers.

“It also leaves you with a service gap,” she said. “People don’t phone the councillor’s office to say, ‘Gee, I’m mad that you paid that many people in Toronto Water.’ They phone us to say, ‘I’m mad that something happened, something’s wrong with my service in Toronto Water.’”

Dave Hewitt, acting president of CUPE Local 416, which represents city workers, including those in the water and solid waste divisions, agreed there are “huge issues” of the city not filling vacant positions.

“I think it would cost the city less and be more efficient to the city if we would fill these positions,” Hewitt said. “That’s the problem the public is facing. They’re not getting the timely service, I feel, by not filling these positions.”