City plans to stop paying double for overtime

Colorado Springs city employees have been raking in double time for working overtime in certain situations, a revelation that shocked at least one city councilman Thursday.

“This is obscene,” Councilman Tom Gallagher said.

“The rest of the known world operates under overtime is time-and-a-half,” he said.

The policy allowing city employees to collect double time under certain circumstances, such as working on holidays observed by the city government, after 16 consecutive hours on the clock or on their second day off, has been in effect for at least 12 years.

But the policy will cease to exist next month at the direction of City Manager Penelope Culbreth-Graft, who ordered the policy change as part of a cost-cutting effort in the 2010 budget, Human Resources Director Ann Crossey said.

“We will not have any double time overtime rates,” Crossey said. “We’re doing away with all of them. The most someone would get is time-and-a-half.”

Some city employees don’t like the change.

“This is another example of HR whittling away at some of the benefits that made working for the city a good job,” Fleet Service Supervisor Randy Lawson, whose annual base pay is $73,298, said Thursday morning in an e-mail to the City Council.

“The comment ... demonstrates a sense of entitlement that borders on obscene,” Gallagher said about Lawson’s e-mail.

Crossey said other city employees “aren’t real happy” with the policy change either.

“Like you, like me, like anybody else, if you’re at one point getting this rate and all of a sudden it’s reduced, whether it’s base pay, overtime or anything else, nobody likes to have their compensation reduced — at least nobody that I know,” she said.

Crossey said city employees don’t get double time for working overtime often.

Although the city government will save money with the policy change, the savings won’t be huge because employees will still get time-and-a-half for working overtime, she said.

“If you drop (the double time) back to time-and-a-half, you’re still paying three-quarters of that amount,” she said. “You’re probably talking about $350,000 (in double time pay) for a year, so you take a quarter of that away and that’s the savings.”

Crossey said overtime pay doesn’t count toward an employee’s retirement benefits.

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