Not good enough

Wednesday, March 4, 2009 | 2:08 a.m.

It was two years ago that the Las Vegas Sun began reporting on a problem that had gotten out of hand. Nearly one out of every six full-time public employees in the Las Vegas Valley — including nearly two-thirds of all Clark County firefighters — had earned more than $100,000 in 2006.

Many of those salaries were inflated because of excessive amounts of overtime pay.

Instead of hiring employees to share the workload, city and county agencies had fallen into the bad habit of loading up existing workers with extra pay in exchange for more hours on the job.

Common sense dictates, though, that when employees work long days on a regular basis they stand a greater chance of burnout. Productivity suffers and the public, which relies on these employees for services, winds up paying for a workforce that is not as efficient as possible.

As reported Tuesday by the Sun’s Jeff German, the county is expected to spend $1.3 million less on overtime this year than in the prior year. That is progress, but it is certainly not enough.

The county still intends to spend more than $20.7 million on overtime through the fiscal year that ends June 30.

District Court, aided by the mandatory creation of 65 positions to support seven new judgeships, managed to slash overtime costs by 38 percent. On the other extreme was the Election Department, which is on pace to spend 30 times as much on overtime through June as in the prior year, an increase blamed on November’s costly elections.

It is clear that hiring employees can reduce the need for overtime pay. The county fire department is planning this year to reduce its overtime pay by nearly 4 percent because of the hiring in November of 22 recruits.

Nonetheless, all local government agencies should do a better job of reducing overtime pay through better long-range planning and more efficient delivery of services.