With Mayor John Lombardi III continuing to challenge the Common Council to come up with solutions for overspending in the public works overtime budgets, Alderman John Craig presented an overtime approval form at Wednesday’s council work session.
Craig, who represents the 1st Ward, said the approval form was created by Dan Cavallari, city finance director, as the city’s first formal overtime tracking and approval mechanism.
Craig said there are no city records detailing the reason for overtime use.
“I’m sure the police and fire departments do a better job regulating that than other departments,” Craig said, due to shift requirements and billing.
The city highway department’s overspending of budgeted overtime funds came to light June 17 when Cavallari provided aldermen with a breakdown of that spending by department. At that time, the city’s equipment maintenance garage had reached its overtime budget of $30,000. In the same period, the city parks payroll had surpassed its overtime budget of $20,000 and the city’s forestry crew had surpassed its overtime budget of $38,000.
Lombardi provided no answers Friday to emailed questions about whether he has reviewed overtime records; increased use of temporary agency workers; contracted out equipment repairs; adjusted some worker shifts to cover weekends on regular pay; changed event set-up procedures; or requested department heads to attend a meeting to discuss causes and solutions.
In an email response, Lombardi said, “We have meetings scheduled for discussion in the near future. No complete answers presently.”
Craig said the draft form would increase accountability for overtime use by requiring an explanation of the need and tasks involved, the number of hours requested, and advance approval from the mayor and finance director. Craig said for urgent situations, the form could be approved digitally.
“It’s not something that has been implemented in the past,” Craig said. “Overtime has been blatantly utilized willy-nilly. Some staffing is lower than what is considered optimal, and we’ve had quite a few catastrophic events, but it seems that some of what is not recognized is that we’re very grossly overextended budget-wise. We have to put some guardrails on it. And moving forward, we need to monitor what it’s being used for.”
“I think it’s a great tool to be used, and I don’t understand why we haven’t been using it,” said Marcus Wyche, 2nd Ward alderman of the form.
Wyche said he has not heard Lombardi suggest any action steps or solutions to the overtime issue since it was raised. He said the city’s water department has staff scheduled for weekends as part of their regular shifts, but it is not a practice in every department.
“Things that we can control, we’re not doing a good job at it,” Wyche said. “It’s out of control and we need to address it as a unit. We do not want to get in a position where we have to make decisions on things we could have prevented.”
Rowland O’Malley, Common Council president and 3rd Ward alderman, did not respond to calls about the overtime issue this week. Last month, O’Malley said little could be done about managing overtime for the remainder of 2026. He said measures to avoid future overtime accruals would likely have to wait to be addressed in upcoming union contract negotiations.
On Thursday, Wyche expressed a greater sense of urgency.
“We believe that it’s just a free-for-all right now and it’s going to come to a point where we need some kind of guidance,” he said. “We don’t want to wait until the last minute to move funds over. We need to make sure that department heads stay the course and if not, we need to have an explanation why.”
Craig said that while there are emergencies and required public works duties that involve overtime, it can be optimized for better productivity. Under some union contracts, he said employees must be paid for a minimum of four hours when scheduled for overtime. Craig said if streets employees are putting up and taking down barriers for a weekend event that only requires one hour of work, other duties can be planned for the remaining three hours that are paid.
“We’re trying to come up with an agreement with AFSCME and CSEA (unions) to allow some volunteer groups to set up and take down barriers that can be picked up on a Monday morning,” Craig said. “For park clean-up and beautification, we can come up with more neighborhood volunteer groups, and be more open to a public-private partnership so that things can be done so that it doesn’t cost the city money. We’ll see if we can broker that arrangement.”
Without progress on such strategies, Craig said, “It may come down to us as a council to say that all overtime is frozen unless it’s a health and safety issue. We can’t afford to pay out overtime if we don’t know what it’s being used for. At that point, it becomes fiscally uncontrollable.”