Thursday, May 23, 2013

Home
Overtime Issues Set the Stage for Municipal Service Cuts (KTVA.com Exclusive)
Municipal departments wrangle with ballooning budgets
By Kirsten Swann


ANCHORAGE – Just a week before the Spring Equinox, the houses on Spurr Lane remained covered in a thick blanket of snow.

The dead-end West Anchorage road was quiet, and the drifts piled up along the fences and front yards muffled the sounds of the surrounding neighborhood and the unmarked police sedans and Major Crime Scene van idling in the street. Tight-lipped detectives moved silently between the van and a blue house on the west side of the street.

They snapped pictures of the yard, the front of the two-story home, a white trailer parked in the driveway and a mobile white shed situated next to it. A soft yellow light showed through the curtains in a window at the front of the house, and the door next to the garage was ajar.

The home belonged to Israel Keyes, an Anchorage contractor charged with the kidnapping and death of 18-year-old Samantha Koenig in early February. But in early March, it was just one milestone in the months-long search to find Koenig’s abductor. Police released little information about their investigation, but detectives worked around the clock to follow leads, examine tips and interview potential witnesses.

During one point in the investigation, a spokesman for the police department said detectives put in as many as 55 overtime hours in a desperate attempt to bring the kidnapped teenager home. They weren’t the only public servants committing extra hours to their city: The same snow piled along Keyes’ driveway March 13 was just a portion of the more than eleven feet of total winter snowfall, and road crews had battled unrelenting, record-breaking accumulation all season.

Both the police and public works departments joined the ranks of municipal agencies that have dipped into the red over the first quarter of 2012. Along with finance and information technology, the departments are on a fast track to depleting their annual labor budgets.

An Anchorage Assembly resolution scheduled for a public hearing Tuesday would designate $3.7 million, the last of the prior year’s budget reserves, to put department budgets back in line. The city could also turn to two separate reserve funds if spending continued to grow, but Budget Director Cheryl Frasca said first quarter increases were normal parts of the budgetary process.

She said the Finance Department, which had already blazed through 130 percent of its overtime budget, was in the process of implementing a citywide payroll and finance program, “the backbone of the city.” It was a complicated and expensive process. Frasca said it went hand-in-hand with the implementation of the new Kronos human resources software, and the Employee Relations Department had already spent nearly three quarters of its overtime budget on system projects.

Once the programs are in place, local finance officials said they will lead to massive savings in labor and time over the years.

“We’re zeroing in,” Frasca said. “It just takes a lot of time.”

Besides covering Kronos and SAP-related overtime costs, the assembly planned on allotting an additional $1.7 million to cover sky-high winter snow removal expenses. Additional funding would also cover increased overtime costs in the Public Transportation Department, which suffered from personnel shortages following a batch of retirements earlier this year.

While transportation director Lance Wilber said his department was in the process of hiring and training the drivers necessary to bring it up to full staff levels, other departments will feel the pinch of overtime overspending throughout the year.

The police department will cut back on special enforcements throughout the year in the wake of the all-consuming Koenig investigation. Deputy Chief Steve Smith said it was the nature of the job.

“That is police work, you can’t not investigate it,” he said. “That’s our challenge: Here’s what we’ve got to get done, here’s what we have to do it with.”

Police labor spending, including overtime, topped $17 million over the first three months of 2012 alone.

He said the public safety overtime budgets were one of the most closely scrutinized elements of their work. By going through it early in the year, he said the department would need to cut back on specialized assignments like bike patrols, focused enforcements in high-crime neighborhoods or targeted DUI patrols during holiday weekends.

Putting a temporary hold on special enforcements wouldn’t necessarily mean an upswing in crime rates: Smith said there were no hard numbers tying the two together, and crime rates hinged on everything from economic to demographic factors, too.

But when money becomes tight, the extra patrols and special enforcements will be the first to go.

“We do the best we can and we focus on the things we have to focus on,” Smith said.