The Safety and Licensing Committee met 05/22/2024. During that meeting they received reports from Fire Chief Jeremy Hansen and Police Chief Polly Olson on the factors and issues that impact overtime payments in the Fire Department and the Police Department.
I’ve prepared a transcript of the discussion for download:
FIRE DEPARTMENT – In 2023, the Fire Department spent approximately $1.1 million on overtime. This was an increase of 35% in overtime payments made in 2022 and a 65% increase on the payments in 2021. In 2024, they are on pace to, again, have approximately $1.1 million – $1.2 million in overtime costs.
The reasons for this are:
- Two employees have been out over the last couple years due to medical issues, and both have now resigned.
- AFD has many young employees who are starting becoming fathers and are using the FMLA benefits
- In 2023, AFD sent 4 employees to paramedic school.
- Changes to the regional hiring process resulted in a significant decrease in the number and quality of candidates.
- AFD currently has 5 vacancies which puts them at minimum staffing levels every single day and results in overtime whenever someone is sick or on vacation.
Chief Hansen did not that their overtime budget cost were offset by some reimbursements and grants. They have agreements with Wisconsin Emergency Management for structural collapse services and receive reimbursements for all of the training that they do for that. He anticipated that those reimbursements would be between $60,000 and $80,000 this year. Additionally, they received a grant of $192,000 which will be put toward the overtime costs associated with paramedic training.
They had also updated their hiring process. After Fox Valley Technical College stopped providing its regional recruitment program, the Fire Department had tried out a third-party recruitment vendor FVTC had directed them to called National Testing Network. That had been unsuccessful, resulting in far fewer qualified candidates and only one new hire.
AFD has now moved to an internally run recruitment program that has resulted in a larger number of quality candidates. Their goal is to hire 5 new candidates who will start toward the end of September. The increase in employees will allow them to reduce overtime by the end of the year.
POLICE DEPARTMENT – Chief Olson could not provide specific dollar amounts for the Police Department’s overtime. Due to how the contract with officers is written and the various ways in which overtime can be taken, it is difficult to provide an estimate partway through the year.
Like the Fire Department, the Police Department has a lot of young officers whose wives are having babies. They also had an officer suffered an injury earlier this year while arresting a drunk driver, and the officer involved in the officer-involved-shooting at the Maritime Tavern earlier this year had been put on administrative leave for about 6 weeks. Both of these situations resulted in other employees having to step in to make sure minimum staffing requirements were met.
The number of overtime hours worked thus far is down slightly from last year and are currently at 3306 hours of overtime as compared to 3720 in 2023. This is mostly because last year after Paul Rhoads was murdered, his alleged killer Yia Lor was injured during a chase in Sheboygan and hospitalized in Milwaukee, and the Appleton police had to provide round the clock security while he was in the hospital in Milwaukee.
Chief Olson also mentioned that Appleton is very likely to have a political campaign visit this year, and those always end up being costly for the overtime budget. She did not have an estimate of how much a political visit costs the city, but she did say that in the past, even though the city has sent out bills, campaigns have never paid.
Additionally, the city is coming up on the summer events season which also impacts the overtime budget.
APD just hired two more officers and have two other recruits who just graduated from the recruit academy, so they will be bringing those four people on presently. Chief Olson was also hopeful that they would have one or two more successful recruits from a recently completed hiring process. She said that APD has four open positions right now.
View full meeting details and video here: https://cityofappleton.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=1183021&GUID=804CAC4B-AF5B-4481-ABF1-3D574EBCEDFD
Be the first to reply