Overtime for Buffalo’s city employees through the roof

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Despite the city’s worsening finances, Buffalo’s public employees — mostly cops and firefighters — are racking up overtime pay like never before.

Last fiscal year, no fewer than 26 employees earned more than $100,000 in overtime.

Another 270 pocketed over $50,000 in overtime, while 400 more took home at least $20,000.

The result: a $22 million hole in the city budget that wrapped up in June.

Those figures come from a report issued last week by Buffalo Comptroller Barbara Miller-Williams, whose staff reviewed five years of payroll records to document the burgeoning cost of overtime and its impact on the city budget.

The comptroller reports that between 2020 and 2024 the city spent an average of $232 million annually on payroll, with overtime averaging $32 million per year. But those averages don’t describe the cost trajectory, which has been arcing steadily upward. 

In 2021 the city spent $27.3 million in overtime. By 2024, the cost had risen to $41.1 million — an increase of over 50 percent in just four years. The membership of that elite $100,000+ club has grown, too: From six employees in 2021 to 12 the following year, to 17 the year after that, and finally to 26 in the budget year that ended in June.

The actual cost of overtime far outstripped the amount former Mayor Byron Brown budgeted for it in each of the last four years. In all, the Brown administration miscalculated overtime costs by more than $52 million in that period.

That $52 million shortfall is part of the reason the Brown administration turned to federal pandemic relief funds to balance its budgets. Brown has used more than half the $330 million it received through the American Rescue Plan for operating costs, at the expense of community programs and infrastructure improvements to which his administration originally promised the money.

Acting Mayor Chris Scanlon, who took office last month when Brown left to become head of Western Regional Off-Track Betting Corp., has not ruled out the possibility that what remains of the federal pandemic funds — as much as $41 million — will be used the same way. All that money must be obligated by the end of this year or be returned to the federal government.

Total payroll costs rose by nearly 20 percent over four years, according to the comptroller — from nearly $216 million in 2021 to a little over $256 million last year. 

The percentage of annual payroll attributed to overtime has been creeping higher each year, according to the comptroller’s analysis.

The vast majority of those increases come from the police and fire departments. Police overtime is up nearly $6 million — more than 50 percent — over four years, and fire overtime is up $4 million in that period, close to half.

Overtime in the Department of Public Works rose in that period by almost $3.8 million, or more than 64 percent. Much of that increase can be attributed to the costs of clearing streets after back-to-back snowstorms last January.

Overtime across all other city departments was pretty consistent. The total payroll cost for those other departments rose about 11 percent, but that rise is nearly all attributable to increases in base pay.

The total number of hours worked by city employees hasn’t changed much over four years, according to the comptroller’s analysis. It’s just that a greater percentage of those hours are overtime. Just under 10 percent of the hours logged in 2021 counted as overtime. In 2024, overtime accounted for more than 13 percent of hours worked.

The increase in base pay for city employees is in part the result of raises for police, which are the product of a new contract adopted earlier this year, as well as a 2022 decision by a state arbitration panel awarding officers raises and back pay worth $15 million. The new police contract expires at the end of next June. 

The current budget is balanced with $25 million in federal pandemic funds and $15 million from the city’s reserves. Those revenue sources won’t be available to Scanlon, the acting mayor, and the Common Council as they craft a new budget in April and May.

Councilman Mitch Nowakowski, chair of the Finance Committee, said the underestimating of expenses “does not come as a total surprise” to city lawmakers “who have been critical of the previous administration’s well-known budget practices of optical illusions.”

But he called the degree to which overtime exceeded budgets “alarming.”

“Underestimating expenditure lines to create a facade of holding the line on expenses is harmful,” he said.

“As Council members look at the under-reporting in expenditures for overtime, I urge them to also look at the over-projections in the revenue lines of parking, cannabis, property sales and fines that do not come in at the rate budgeted — thus leading to funny numbers and a looming deficit.”

Geoff Kelly