Report: OT pay for Fire brass wiped out furlough day savings

Holiday and overtime pay for some of the Chicago Fire Department’s top personnel wiped out hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings from making them take unpaid days off work, according to a new report from the city’s top internal watchdog.
As the number of unpaid days off swelled to 24 last year, so too did overtime and holiday pay for dozens of deputy district chiefs, assistant deputy chief paramedics, internal affairs investigators and administrative workers.
Imposing 15 unpaid days in 2009 and 24 the next year saved the city nearly $806,000. But holiday and overtime pay topped $1.1 million during those two years, for a net loss of about $335,000, according to the report by Inspector General Joseph Ferguson.
Ferguson recommended that the department not pay its top commanders for overtime or holidays because they are on salary and not covered by the union contract for lower-level employees that mandate those benefits. At the Chicago Police Department, non-union supervisors are given time off as compensation for overtime and holidays, his report states.
The report also questions whether that group was entitled to about $208,000 in “availability pay” and clothing and gear allowances they were paid in 2010 alone. Those payments also are in the contract for rank-and-file firefighters but are not guaranteed to non-union supervisors.
Ferguson’s report follows a preliminary one on the same topic last July. Since then, the department has stopped compensating commanders for holidays at pay that is about two-and-a-half times the normal hourly rate. It labeled those payments as clerical errors and took steps to recover a good portion of the money, according to the latest report.
The report also notes that the imposition of unpaid days off work could be the reason overtime spiked in 2009 and 2010 among district deputy chiefs and assistant deputy chief paramedics. It recommends the city evaluate whether it should impose unpaid days off on those workers.
Higher rates of medical absence and overtime pay to deputy chiefs who oversaw once-a-decade promotion tests also boosted overtime, the report states.