More than a dozen high-ranking Erie County Sheriff’s Office appointees received holiday-related overtime pay in 2023, totaling more than $72,500, even though county officials agreed a year ago to end a heavily criticized practice of administrators collecting huge sums of overtime.
From 2020 through 2022, department commissioners, chiefs and other appointees in county government who are not typically entitled to overtime were paid $3 million in OT and cashed-out comp time, according to a Buffalo News analysis.Â
Beginning in 2023, the County Legislature awarded top nonunion administrators higher base salaries in exchange for correcting a “policy error” that allowed top appointees to collect overtime instead of a straight salary. Chiefs in the Sheriff’s Office received many of the largest one-time salary bumps, with at least half a dozen of them seeing raises of $30,000 or more this year.Â
Even so, Sheriff John Garcia contends that the no-overtime policy was never meant to apply to high-ranking staff who are called in to work on the holidays.
“Holiday work was not part of the agreement,” he said.
Thirteen Sheriff’s Office chiefs, superintendents and deputies with job titles reclassified as “salaried” received worked-holiday overtime this year. For most, that ranged between $3,500 and $8,500.  Â
That came as a surprise to a number of county administrators, including Comptroller Kevin Hardwick. He said it was everyone’s common understanding last year that the “no overtime” provision included all sources of extra pay, including extra pay of time-and-a-half for working on holidays.
Garcia mentioned no overtime carve-outs last year for chiefs working during the holidays. The only exception to the no-overtime rule that he, or any other county officials, expressed to the County Legislature was stadium overtime pay related to Bills stadium and KeyBank Center arena security. That overtime is allowed because the expense is fully…
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