The City of Tulsa paid $7.6 million last fiscal year for police and fire overtime, exceeding the budget by more than $2 million.
Those overtime costs come out of the city’s general fund, so they affect other departments. The police department went $1.6 million over its overtime budget, and Deputy Chief Jonathan Brooks said that’s sort of a double whammy.
"When you start talking on the order of $1 million, you're talking about the difference between 15 to 20 additional officers that could be put in those positions to, for lack of a better word, supplant the overtime expenditure," Brooks said.
The fire department was $1 million over its overtime budget. Both departments say using dedicated funding to hire more people would greatly reduce overtime spending.
City Councilor Blake Ewing wanted to know why several leaders want new funding to hire more cops and firefighters instead of diverting some of the roughly $5 million budgeted for overtime for new hires.
"If you made that decision today and you hired an officer, it'd be 10 months before they could actually go out and function in that role because of the time it takes to train them," said city Finance Director Mike Kier. "So, you've got to carry that double cost of the ongoing overtime until they complete training."
Ewing said city leaders need to find a balance between paying for overtime and paying for new hires.
"I just don't want us stepping into a conversation about overtime with an immediate assumption that overtime is bad and we should be doing all that we can to eradicate overtime, and that if we just had more money, overtime would go away," Ewing said.
Fire Chief Ray Driskell and Brooks said most of their overtime costs come from filling entire shifts, not from personnel being held over a few hours.
