Overtime Pay for Hamilton Aide Stirs County Row

For 3 1/2 years, Neil Haas toiled as the top aide to former San Diego County Supervisor Tom Hamilton. During that time, Haas says, he never missed a day of work--for vacation, illness or any other reason.

And after Hamilton was defeated in June, 1984, Haas accumulated 175 hours of compensatory time off --more than four weeks’ worth --working extra hours for six months to prepare for the transition to incoming Supervisor Brian Bilbray, he said.

So when Haas, whose $46,000 annual salary made him the highest paid supervisor’s aide in county history, left with Hamilton on Jan. 7, he took with him a check for $9,595. That figure included his pay for 95 hours of unused compensatory time and 334 hours--eight weeks--of vacation.

Haas’ final paycheck soon became the subject of hallway gossip among supervisors’ aides on the third floor at the County Administration Center. And now it may become the focus of an attempt to limit or eliminate compensatory time for such aides and to be more strict about the amount of vacation an employee may carry over from one year to the next.

In an interview, Bilbray said he believes supervisors’ staff members ought to work as many hours as it takes to do their job. If that comes to more than 40 hours a week, too bad, he said. If it’s less, that’s fine, too.

“I just don’t see it as a 9-to-5 job,” said Bilbray, angry because Haas’ final pay was deducted from the District 1 office budget. “My staff works well over eight hours a day. I expect it of them. There are doctors and lawyers and accountants out there in the free market who work pretty darn hard to make their businesses go. That happens to be what it takes to get the job done.”

Supervisor Paul Eckert was more succinct. “That’s outrageous,” he said of Haas’ final check. “He ripped the county off.”

Current policy limits to 200 the number of compensatory hours board aides can keep on the books. Accumulated vacation time is limited to twice an employee’s annual allotment. That limit was waived in Haas’ case by Chief Administrative Officer Clifford Graves after Hamilton said Haas was too busy to take a vacation.

Interviews with supervisors and their aides and a review of county payroll records show that over the years, different supervisors have taken different approaches to staff accumulation of compensatory time.

When Mayor Roger Hedgecock was a county supervisor, for example, his aides always logged their extra hours and recorded them with the county’s payroll office. Later, when they took time off to work on Hedgecock’s campaigns, the aides could use this “comp time.” Diane Barlow, a longtime Hedgecock aide who now works for Supervisor George Bailey, said she has 200 hours of time on the books.

“I reached the limit on comp time a long time ago, and I haven’t accrued any in years,” Barlow said. “The nice thing about keeping records is that when you do take time off, you can show that it is for time you put in overtime. Otherwise, there’s no way of really determining whether you’ve got a balance between time taken off and overtime that was worked.”

In contrast, aides to then-Supervisor Jim Bates, now a U.S. congressman, never took compensatory time.

“There was an understanding that if you were salaried you didn’t clock in or clock out,” said James Bartell, who worked for Bates at the county and followed him to Congress. “You just worked whatever hours it took to get the job done.”

That’s an informal practice that Bilbray said might better be made a policy. It’s not fair to penalize incoming supervisors for the work habits of their predecessors, he argued. “Anytime you get a situation where there’s going to be a substantial adverse impact to a budget, you’ve got a less than proper situation,” he said. “When there can be thousands of dollars taken out of a budget unforeseen, that’s not what I call a real responsible way of managing it.”

Three years ago, the retirement of planning director Paul Zucker caused a similar ruckus. Zucker quit in May, 1982. But because of accumulated compensatory time and vacation, he was kept on the county payroll until September, allowing him to qualify for the county’s pension plan. Supervisors responded by eliminating compensatory time for department directors and their top assistants.

Now it appears that the same fate may be in store for supervisors’ aides. None of the five current board members will allow their assistants to accumulate compensatory time.

“It’s a put-out job, and everyone puts out,” Supervisor Leon Williams said. “My people work Saturdays, Sundays, nights, and we make no record of comp time. If someone needs to go to a physician on a Tuesday afternoon, they go. We get the job done. We don’t try to pin people down to the minute.”

Eckert takes a similar tack. “In our office, if someone goes to a night meeting, I expect them to remember the time they came in late one morning, or the time they stopped off at the dry cleaners during lunch. Everyone’s on a salary. You’ve got a job to do and you do it.”

But Haas, the former Hamilton aide whose paycheck raised the issue, said he thinks supervisors’ aides have as much right to overtime as other county employees.

“They want employees that give, give, give instead of getting something in return,” said Haas, who has returned to the private sector to manage an electronics business he owns. “I have people in my business, I pay them for every single minute they’re working. In the county they don’t do that. I don’t understand it.”

Haas said he routinely worked 60 hours a week at his job in Hamilton’s office, even after the two-term supervisor lost to Bilbray and became a lame duck.

“We were working that agenda right up to the end,” Haas said. “He was a supervisor until the day he left.”