$14M spent in 2016 despite hiring surge
Overtime costs at the Denver Sheriff Department continue to skyrocket, reaching $14 million last year despite a hiring spree that added nearly 200 deputies to the roster and pledges to change employment practices that could curb excessive spending.
The sheriff’s department is on track to spend nearly as much on overtime in 2017; the department paid $6.4 million for 133,933 hours of overtime during the first six months of the year, according to data provided by the Denver Department of Safety.
But officials insist the department is getting on track and blame soaring overtime costs, in part, on mandatory training. Now that training is complete and new scheduling practices are in place, the department expects to get overtime hours under control, said Daelene Mix, a safety department spokeswoman.
“We really believe you’ll be able to see that stabilizing effect as we head into 2018, for overtime,” Mix said.
Corrections experts warn the sheriff is taking a risk by relying on overtime to run the city’s two jails. Excessive overtime not only is costly to taxpayers, it creates a dangerous environment inside the jails, with deputies working too many hours in a high-stress job, said Mark Pogrebin, a criminology professor at the University of Colorado Denver.
“You’re not alert. You’re irritable. You’re more impatient,” Pogrebin said. “You want people to work overtime from time to time, but it sounds like here it has become a practice.”
In 2016, Deputy Graham Dunn earned $111,081 in overtime pay, while three other deputies earned more than $90,000 each in overtime, according to the safety department.
While Pogrebin hasn’t studied
the sheriff’s department overtime issue in depth, he said the department’s inability to control it is a problem. Officials haven’t justified why the excessive hours are necessary, he said.
“Every year, it is a new excuse,” Pogrebin said. “One year, it’s ‘We don’t have enough people,’ and the next year, it’s ‘They’ve got to be trained.'”
Sheriff Patrick Firman and executive director of safety Stephanie O’Malley report to Mayor Michael Hancock, whose staff said he was not available to comment on the issue. The mayor’s staff deferred questions about overtime to O’Malley’s office, where Mix is the spokeswoman.
The sheriff’s department’s overtime hours first jumped in 2010 when Denver opened the Downtown Detention Center. Its design requires more deputies than the County Jail on Smith Road, but city officials incorrectly thought they could operate it with the same number. The department is just now addressing the staffing issue.
In 2014, the department’s overtime expenses — roughly $8 million — led some City Council members to question department leadership and their oversight of spending.
In 2015, consultants hired to do a top-to-bottom review of the sheriff’s department labeled excessive overtime spending an “operational red flag.” They recommended the department change its scheduling practices and train supervisors to manage budgets to help curb overtime hours.
That year, the department spent $10.7 million for 213,000 hours of overtime after interim Sheriff Elias Diggins implemented mandatory overtime for deputies, meaning they could not turn down a supervisor’s request to work extra hours.
Firman abolished mandatory overtime when he was hired in late 2015 and put limits on how much overtime each deputy could work in a week.
In 2016, Hancock increased the sheriff’s department budget by $24 million to help reform the department, including adding deputies to the roster. Last year, the department hired those deputies, including a much ballyhooed “megaclass,” boosting its ranks to nearly 800 deputies. Still, the overtime hours climbed.
The sheriff paid $13.9 million for 283,750 hours of overtime in 2016, according to data provided by the safety department. In comparison, the Denver Police Department, which has about 1,400 police officers, paid $12.5 million in overtime in 2016.
The sheriff’s department has struggled to maintain proper staffing levels. It is about 60 deputies short of being full strength, Mix said.
Six to eight employees leave the department each month, she said, and another 55 deputies, on average, are on limited duty as a result of injury or illness.
“It’s been really hard to get to where we need to be,” Mix said. “We’re trying.”
On Tuesday, in anticipation of a Denver Post story about the overtime expenses, Firman sent an email to City Council explaining the department’s spending. In it, Firman said staffing remains a challenge.
“While overtime use remains a focal point, the Department recognizes that recruiting and employee retention are the larger, underlying issue and work is underway to employ strategies that will increase staffing levels,” Firman wrote.
Staffing shortages saved the department $120,000 from its $107.7 million personnel budget, Mix said. The sheriff noted the savings in his email to City Council. The sheriff also said training in 2016 boosted overtime spending, referring to mandatory crisis intervention training for all deputies, an element of the department’s reform plan. Each deputy spent 40 hours in the training, and other deputies were paid overtime to fill the gaps at the two jails, Mix said.
“We knew we were going to have to do a record amount of training,” she said. “We have really tried to be honest all along that we would have to utilize overtime.”
In the past 18 months, the sheriff’s department has made changes to its scheduling practices, something the consultants in 2015 described as dysfunctional.
The department used a mix of work schedules that was inefficient and unnecessarily complex, the consultants said. They found that the department’s 10hour and 12-hour work schedules called for 25 percent more employees and recommended the department put all deputies on eight-hour shifts.
The department chose to switch to 10-hour and eighthour shifts, depending on the position, Mix said. The sheriff and chief deputies believed that system was a better fit for Denver’s jails, she said.
The department has made other changes: Deputies assigned to one jail now can pick up shifts at the other jail. Civilians were hired for some office jobs, which put more deputies into the inmate housing units.
Civilians also manage scheduling, which frees sergeants and captains to supervise deputies. Those sergeants and captains also were trained to manage budgets and overtime, Mix said.
“On its face value, the overtime looks high,” she said, “but you have to look at the bigger picture, not just one piece of it.”