Report Urges Reform of Overtime for City Officials : Finances: Head administrator says DWP payments are most troubling.

The Department of Water and Power, which has repeatedly come under fire in recent years for its spending practices, took another hit Wednesday with a report criticizing its overtime payments to top executives.

The report by City Administrative Officer Keith Comrie said that Los Angeles city government as a whole needs to overhaul its system for dispensing overtime to its highest-paid executives. However, the report added, it must tread carefully to avoid legal challenges.

The problem, the report found, was most troubling at the DWP, where overtime payments far exceed all other civilian departments.

The city utility has more than 400 salaried employees who earn more than $70,000 a year and then collect an average of $4,500 in overtime. That is more than six times the overtime average of $745 for supervisors in all other departments except for the Fire Department.

The Fire Department’s overtime bill for battalion chiefs and assistant chiefs--$16,894 per official--was even higher than the DWP’s. But the report says the overtime was caused by the department’s unique 24-hour staffing requirements and contends that it is cheaper to pay the overtime than to hire more fire officials to work the round-the-clock shifts.

The report is not the first to take the DWP to task for alleged extravagances. Although the city-owned utility is defended by its backers as a source of revenue for Los Angeles, its critics in recent years have made political hay over the big-spending ways of the department’s management.

Six months ago, for instance, members of the City Council called for an audit after it was learned that DWP supervisors running the department during a strike ran up $281,000 worth of catering bills, and sent out for another $125,000 worth of danishes, muffins, cookies and pies. In 1991, the city controller--a longstanding critic of the department--criticized the DWP for sloppy accounting of its petty cash and travel expenses.

In 1990, then-Mayor Tom Bradley toughened travel policies for the department after disclosures that the then-DWP general manager had chartered a jet to Sacramento for $2,800 when much cheaper commercial flights were available--a practice later revealed to be routine. And in 1989, half a dozen members of the department made headlines when they dined with their spouses at the Sheraton Grand Hotel and tried to charge the $879 tab to their expense accounts.

However, it was excess in a different department that triggered the most recent round of criticism. The overtime report was commissioned in 1992 when it was discovered that a top city management analyst, James D. Bisetti, had received $95,000 in overtime over a three-year period.

While Bisetti’s situation was called “a blatant aberration”--he resigned from his $86,000-a-year position under pressure--the report recommends a citywide effort to reduce overtime.

Whatever changes the city suggests in overtime rules must comply with a host of Fair Labor Standard Act requirements that have been hashed out over the years in lawsuits.

The union representing the city’s top fire officials won a suit declaring them “hourly” and not “salaried” employees and thus entitling them to overtime pay at the rate of time and a half. Supervisors in other city departments are also seeking the right to overtime pay.

At a news conference on Wednesday, Councilman Joel Wachs condemned the DWP and called for a halt to what he called “widespread and shocking abuse” of overtime at the utility.

DWP officials say they have already begun efforts to trim overtime costs.

Times staff writer Shawn Hubler contributed to this story.