Roman Slams ‘Abuse’ In Verona Employee OT

From the time he first ran unsuccessfully for Town Council in 2013, Alex Roman has targeted wasteful spending in Verona’s municipal government. Since taking office in July, he’s dug deeper into the town’s budget and on Monday night he delivered a bombshell: Substantial overtime run up by several department managers, increases large enough that Roman forcefully called it “abuse” and ordered it to stop immediately.

Roman told the Council that his analysis of 2014 overtime alone found that one department head increased his take-home pay by 46% through the use of overtime and that the overtime recorded by two department chiefs accounted for about 25% of their respective OT budgets. Roman said some department chiefs were getting overtime for doing work that should have been done by lower-paid subordinates or other township employees and that one department head was receiving an unrecorded $18,150 stipend for work in another town.

“For next year’s budget I am going to propose cutting overtime budgets across the board,” Roman said, “because I think there is significant overuse, waste and abuse of overtime in Verona and I want it to stop.”

In the annual salary ordinances passed by the Town Council, the salaries of some municipal employees can seem quite reasonable. The supervisor of public works was authorized to be paid $95,043.96 in 2014 and the supervisor of buildings and grounds got $95,070.00. But the W-2s of both employees also included substantial overtime: $24,840.12 for the B&G chief and $43,459.65 for the public works supervisor, an amount equal to 46% of his base pay. (Town Council members may not discuss employees by name in public session.)

Roman said that some of the jobs being done by managers could have been done by lower paid employees. He noted that one department head had put in for three hours attendance at a Planning Board meeting “to fill the water jugs, replace the batteries in the wireless microphones and record the meeting.” The OT paid to that supervisor was $71 an hour, Roman estimated. A part-time employee might have cost no more than $15 an hour. The councilman said that Verona must replace rigid work schedules with flex-time and part-timers, instead of supervisors assigning themselves overtime. “I want regular work to happen on regular time in this township and I want that to happen immediately,” he added.

“At the next Planning Board meeting,” Roman added, “I’m going to ask if the employee who was there was there on overtime and if they were I am going to have a real problem with that.”

Roman said that while he found that the supervisor’s base salaries were appropriate, their use of overtime was not: “I believe that is a waste of taxpayer’s dollar and abuse of the system.”

But OT isn’t Verona’s only problem. Several long-time employees also receive “longevity pay”, an extra 8% to 10% paid annually to public employees for their continued employment on top of annual salary increases. Verona’s chief of police got $16,202 in longevity pay for 2014, on top of a base salary of $162,028. The supervisor of public works got $9,504.40, while the supervisor of buildings and grounds got $9,507.00. Verona no longer awards longevity pay to new employees.

Roman’s deep dive into employee pay was the result of a heated debate over three salary ordinances at the October 5 meeting (watch that meeting here). At that meeting, the Council was asked to approve an 18% salary increase for Verona’s chief financial officer. That individual, like the department supervisors, is not a union employee and was the only one singled out for a raise, which Interim Manager Mitchell Stern said had been promised to him at the time of his hiring by former Town Manager Joe Martin.

Council members Jay Sniatkowski and Bob Manley objected to the increase for the CFO, contending that it would be “unfair” to other department heads and that it came without a performance review. But Martin had never done formal performance reviews of any town employees during his tenure. Manley suggested at one point in the October 5 meeting that Mayor Kevin Ryan was bumping up Laracy’s pay solely to curry favor with him. “That will buy a lot of loyalty,” Manley said. While Ryan let the remark slide at that meeting, he directed a sharp rebuke toward Manley at Monday night’s meeting. “I considered it an attack on my integrity,” said Ryan.

Overtime and longevity pay aren’t the only pay issues troubling Roman. He noted, in the October 5 meeting, that Verona has several OPEIU employees who are currently being paid more than the highest mandated salary in the union contract, which is $85,907. He suggested that, if Verona intended to pay beyond the union scale, these employees should be moved to a different position that was not subject to the union agreement. (Roman noted later in the evening that there was no comparable problem in the police contract.)

Roman also said that while taxpayers have been told that salary increases in the OPEIU municipal employees’ contract are only 2.5%, that percentage only applies to workers at the top of the pay scale. Other employees are typically getting 5.5% to 6% increases, with one employee getting a 16.6% raise. Roman said that in his role as a private sector manager he does not give out raises that large to his employees. “Nobody,” he said of his private-sector employees, “is getting a 20% increase over a five-year period.”

Watch Councilman Roman’s remarks at the October 19 meeting here.