L.A. School Officials Ask Board to Budget $2 Million for Overtime

Despite an incomplete review of high overtime costs for school business workers, administrators asked the Los Angeles Board of Education on Monday to count on spending up to $2 million in next year’s budget to pay for such overtime.

In January, a Times analysis found that overtime pay for 860 eligible workers in the budgeting, accounting and technology departments had increased 500% from five years ago--to about $2 million last year--while overtime in other school divisions rose 25% overall.

Monday’s request signals that administrators plan to spend the same amount of money again, even though they previously maintained that overtime was on the decline. The move appears to bolster experts’ warnings that budgeting in advance for overtime gives managers little incentive to reduce it. “It’s the same ol’, same ol’,” said board member David Tokofsky.

The board is scheduled to vote on the issue at its next meeting, on May 19.

Retiring Supt. Sid Thompson, who had expressed surprise at The Times’ disclosures in January, said Monday that a preliminary review of the study he subsequently ordered indicates a need for some hiring, some reduction of overtime and some continued payment of overtime to accommodate unexpected and seasonal work.

But results of the study will not be final until the end of the fiscal year in July, he said, causing him to recommend setting the money aside now as part of $23 million in advance budgeting for items ranging from earthquake training to replacement of school police cars.

“We want to put this money aside . . . but not necessarily spend it,” Thompson said. “We still want to make sure we’re able to carry out those operations.”

The overtime review is not an outside audit. Instead, it is a self-evaluation being conducted by each of the three departments, which Chief Financial Officer Henry Jones described as the logical first step to reducing costs.

“You need to ask those people responsible to give their best thoughts,” Jones said.

But Deputy Supt. Ruben Zacarias, who will become superintendent on July 1, said such institutionalized overtime is the kind of problem he wants addressed by the new business and finance czar he has promised to hire.

“Maybe we could hire a few more people and not use so much overtime,” he said. “It’s not healthy to have people working so much.”

The district has blamed its soaring overtime costs in the three departments on efforts to pare bureaucracy and interweave problem-plagued computer systems, changes that have left fewer employees working harder. An outside management audit of the district completed in 1993 predicted some initial cost increases related to management streamlining but said those costs would decline over time.

Jones characterized his decision to earmark the money in advance for the first time as a conservative budgeting move to avoid a last-minute scurry to find the funds at year’s end.

However, Gilbert Siegel, professor emeritus of public productivity at USC, said that with overtime budgeted in advance “you don’t look at your problems.”

If the $2-million requested Monday is ultimately spent this year, it would match last year’s expenditure, which was down from $2.5 million the year before. The Times analysis found that while the average overtime worked by business division workers last year was 111 hours annually, there were many extreme cases, including a switchboard operator who worked 1,136 overtime hours