BATON ROUGE, La. – East Baton Rouge Parish’s overtime costs grew by 11 percent in 2020, something the mayor-president blames on the coronavirus pandemic and a wild hurricane season.
The city-parish paid about $20.5 million in overtime last year, according to The Advocate’s analysis of payroll data. In 2018 and 2019, that figure hovered around $18.5 million.
Some departments saw overtime costs more than triple last year.
In addition to a hiring freeze the city-parish enacted in response to the pandemic, Mayor-President Sharon Weston Broome said last year’s intense hurricane season and COVID safety protocols also contributed to the uptick.
But she said she doesn’t expect increased payroll costs to hit the city-parish budget too hard since federal grant and stimulus funds will pay back roughly 18% — $3.6 million — of the expenses.
“You have to look at 2020 through the lens of the pandemic,” Broome said. “We had five named storms we had to activate for. We had to keep (city-parish) buildings continuously sanitized. And we had to use overtime to compensate the vacancies we had in departments due to the hiring freeze.”
When the mayor implemented the hiring freeze in April 2020, the city-parish had 791 vacancies — more than 200 of which were frozen and unfunded.
At that time, Metro Councilman Dwight Hudson balked at the idea of a hiring freeze, calling it “low-hanging fruit” and that the administration would need to take more drastic measures to tighten the budget.
Metro Councilman Dwight Hudson said he thinks the mayor’s justification for rising overtime “makes sense,” and he understands how and why the more-active-than-usual hurricane season drove up overtime hours.
“We can never project the amount of expenses we’ll have from named storms,” he said. “We had a lot of curveballs thrown at us last year; so far, I think we managed them well.”
Broome said the municipal budget wasn’t designed to handle the kinds of unexpected expenses brought by the pandemic. Despite that, she said she feels her administration has been a good stewards of taxpayer money.”Our theme in city-parish government is to work efficiently,” she said.
Some of the sharpest spikes in overtime pay last year occurred within maintenance, building and grounds, fleet management and the Mayor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, where employees tallied approximately $1.3 million, $311,000, $63,000 and $37,939 in extra pay, respectively.
The amount of overtime rose more than 36% — $4.7 million compared to $3.4 million — in the fire department. And emergency medical services shelled out an additional $196,000 in overtime last year over the $2.6 million EMS employees clocked in 2019.
One department that saw overtime decline in 2020, if only nominally, was the Baton Rouge Police Department, which saw a $28,000 decrease. But the department still spent more than $8.4 million on overtime — a disproportionate share of it on narcotics officers who more than doubled their salary, in some cases, and are now under investigation for wrongdoing.
Broome said many of the city-parish’s first responders were not only on call or working in some capacity during last year’s wave of hurricanes, but they also provided response services throughout regions where storms had a more severe impact.
And although the football games and live events that drive BRPD overtime during normal years were called off during the pandemic, officers’ OT costs added up anyway because of the department’s response to the police accountability protests last spring and summer.
Flights, meanwhile, were few and far between for much of last year, but overtime pay at the Baton Rouge Airport rose 3% in 2020 to nearly $500,000.
Mike Edwards, director of aviation, said that bump-up in overtime mostly stemmed from federally-set staffing requirements.
“Even though the pandemic did dramatically decrease our flights, we were still operating and there was never a day each airline didn’t operate, at minimum, one flight per day,” Edwards said. “Because of that, we’re required to maintain the minimum level of staffing when it comes to staffing crash and rescue teams.”
He said several officers on the airport’s police department, which is separate from BRPD, contracted coronavirus last year, triggering temporary quarantine stints that led to staffing shortages and increased overtime.
But the airport largely generates its own revenue, Edwards noted, which means it doesn’t really draw from the city-parish budget.
