In CEO Joyce Eleanors Letter to the public in regards to service cuts, she said the agency needed to chop Sunday Service in order to save $13.6 Million. She said they worked hard to look at Service cuts and reductions. Well This blog post is to tell you what they didn't look at, Overtime! In 2009 Community Transit paid out $2.8 million in Overtime to Coach Operators and Transit Supervisors. Just Overtime. 16 Operators made over $20,000 in Overtime, 3 made more than 35,000, and the top overtime earner made over $48,000 in just Overtime. Overtime accounts for 9.56% of the total wages for Operators, and 13.47% for Supervisors. Also, 100% of Supervisors had over time, Average OT was $13,364. 94.5% of operators had overtime averaging $5,925. Only 5.5% of operators had no overtime, this includes PT.
As Far as regular wages, the top earner made $112,639, plus $48,140 in OT for a total of $160,779.
Another Note to make, the CEO, Joyce Eleanor, Makes the Highest wage for a CEO in a Transit Agency in the Puget Sound at $204,341. Its only second in the Northwest behind TriMets CEO in Portland.
Compare to METRO? Sure, Kevin Desmond Makes $172,768. Only 6.22% of Operator Wages are Overtime with an average of $4,291. I do not know the Supervisors statistics at this time.
CT only has about 400 operators, and has $2.23 million in OT. Supervisors add about $500,000 to that, I see other places they can cut, besides service. Also, as a side note, the Overtime could fund 28 new regular operator positions at CT, Minus a few for the cost of benefits.
3 comments:
My theory on this is that it's cheaper to pay OT than the alternative -- more employees.
OT involves no additional benefits (pension, health insurance, time off, etc), can be "laid off" easily, etc.
While that may be true, the point of the post is that are they so mis-managed that they create this much overtime? Its a lot of Overtime for only 400 drivers. METROs overtime is about 4X as much for 7X the employees, and METRO runs special services a lot more than CT does, which speaks for some.
The point I'm trying to make is that maybe it's not mismanagement; maybe it's a concerted effort to save money for the agency.
Of course neither of us really have any idea why they do what they do.
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