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Stratton plays with numbers on police OT

    By just about any measure, Schenectady Mayor Brian Stratton has done a much better job with the city’s finances than his predecessor, Al Jurczynski — for which he has been duly, and almost universally, credited. But it seems this mayor can never get enough credit, and will take it even when it isn’t due. As he did last week when he claimed, after release of an already highly positive independent audit for 2007, to have dramatically reduced the police department’s excess spending on overtime.
    Turns out that claim was misleading, made possible only by resorting to some Jurczynskian bookkeeping. It was good work on the part of Gazette reporter Kathleen Moore to discover this through a Freedom of Information Law request — but, of course, she shouldn’t have had to. It’s important that the city budget not just be in the black, but transparent.
    The fact is, spending on police overtime didn’t go down in 2007, it went up. City Council authorized $1.84 million for it and $2.48 million was spent (in 2006, $2.4 million was spent). That’s $639,000 over budget, less than in 2004 and 2005, but still significant — especially when one considers that the city council has been allocating substantially more for overtime in recent years. It appears the city council is just being realistic: Management issues aside, there are some structural and contractual reasons for all that overtime.
    Stratton, who has been a strong critic of excess police overtime in the past, may have reached the same conclusion as the council — i.e. solving this problem might not be possible, or at least so easy. So he simply declared victory in the overtime war — without honestly or actually winning it. He had his finance director quietly shift unspent funds from other areas of the police budget to the overtime budget, pumping up the overtime budget and — poof! — decreasing the excess overtime spending from $639,000 to just $80,000.
    Ultimately, these transfers make sense and would have happened anyway (as they have the last couple of years, but with full accounting of the excess overtime), since the overall police department budget was in the black, and a major reason was the salary savings on unfilled jobs. But Stratton didn’t discuss the transfers at city council meetings or otherwise make them public. He just approved them and then created the impression that overtime was way down and “in check,” comparing it to other years when the accounting was done differently — in effect, comparing apples to oranges.
    While credit is a nice thing for a political leader to have, credibility is essential. Next time, Stratton should remember this.

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SCHENECTADY
Records show overtime spending on rise Police spending in black, but OT costly
BY KATHLEEN MOORE Gazette Reporter
Reach Gazette reporter Kathleen Moore at 395-3120 or moore@dailygazette.com

    The Police Department overspent its overtime budget by $639,000 last year, contrary to the mayor’s announcement Monday that it only broke its budget by $80,000.
    The mayor also claimed to have reduced overtime spending in the department and said he has held it “in check” for three years, but a review of the department’s fi nancial records Friday showed that overtime is on the rise.
    However, the department did finish 2007 in the black, in total spending. It had $111,000 left over on Dec. 31.
    Mayor Brian U. Stratton said that proved the department is fi - nally being run responsibly, after many years of overspending its entire budget.
    “For once we have efficient and effective administration,” he said. “The net result is we finished in the black.”
    But the city is also spending more on overtime now than it did when Stratton — who has long criticized the increase in overtime spending — was first elected mayor.
    In 2004, the city spent $2.4 million on police overtime. In 2005, with Stratton’s first budget as mayor, it spent $2 million. In 2006, it went back up to $2.4 million. In 2007, it inched even higher, to $2.48 million.
    The Schenectady City Council had only authorized the department to spend $1.84 million on overtime, but the mayor said Public Safety Commissioner Wayne Bennett had done a great job in sticking to his budget.
    While presenting what seemed to be a wholly positive audit of the city’s 2007 finances, Stratton reported Monday that the department missed its budgeted overtime limit by just $80,000. That was a coup for his administration, which has worked hard to reduce overtime spending.
    In previous years, the overtime budget was overspent by hundreds of thousands of dollars. In 2004, police spent $1.7 million more than authorized. In 2005, the department went $816,000 over budget, followed by an overspending of $373,000 in 2006.
    The declining trend, culminating in the $80,000 over-expenditure in 2007, was highlighted Monday in a full-color slide during Stratton’s presentation. In a press release that accompanied the slides, he said his administration had “held overtime in check” and that Bennett’s “careful management” of the department was helping to control costs far more than they had been in 2004. He emphasized that in that year, the department overspent its overtime budget by nearly 200 percent.
    Stratton never mentioned that in actual dollars, more money was spent on overtime in 2007 than in 2004.
    Instead, he said overtime had been reduced through redeployment of personnel, the hiring of additional officers and the use of grants.
RECORDS SHOW FUNDS
    He declined to explain those remarks after the city released its detailed overtime records Friday in response to a Freedom of Information request. The records showed that overtime spending had gone up and that the police spent $639,000 more than the council had authorized in the 2007 budget — far more than the $80,000 that the mayor reported.
    When a reporter first questioned the mayor’s report, Finance Director Ismat Alam said she didn’t know what could have caused the discrepancy.
    But after releasing the financial records on Friday, she said she had quietly added $559,000 to the police overtime budget, with the mayor’s approval, over the course of the year.
    Each month, she said, she moved some money from the department’s salary line to its overtime line. Those transfers — which were legal — were never discussed at Schenectady City Council meetings and were never announced. Alam said council members were kept informed through monthly lists of all budget transfers.
    Alam and Stratton defended the transfers as legitimate since the money had been allocated to the police and the total budget stayed in the black.
    “I mean, you’ve got the money budgeted,” Stratton said. “That’s a routine practice.”
    In past years, however, the city appears to have accurately reported the department’s overtime expenditures, even if it later used money left over in other budget lines to pay the overage in the overtime line.
BLANCHFIELD NOT WORRIED
    The change in reporting did not particularly upset Councilman Mark Blanchfield, who chairs the council’s finance committee.
    “If the department comes in on budget, I’m pretty happy,” he said, noting that the department overspent its total budget for many years in a row before Stratton took office.
    Blanchfield added that he doesn’t have any concerns about the steady increase in police overtime. Stratton has long criticized overtime spending as a risky practice that puts tired officers on the road, is disproportionately and unfairly offered to the most experienced officers, and costs the city more in the long run as officers take compensatory leave instead of overtime pay and then must be replaced by another officer working on overtime.
    He has also said good managers should be able to stay within their budget, partly by filling vacancies.
    That’s what Bennett did — but his new hires spent most of 2007 in training. Alam said it made sense to transfer funds from salary to the overtime line while the department waited for its new officers.
    “Officers had to be on the street,” she said.
    Blanchfield said the overtime spending should be viewed in that light.
    “Overtime is really a reflection of our difficulty in keeping our [employment] numbers up,” he said, adding that he doesn’t agree with the Stratton’s reasons for trying to reduce overtime.
    “I don’t agree with the premise in the first place, that slight upticks are emblematic of problems in the department,” Blanchfield said.