OUR VIEW: Volusia County must get a handle on overtime

There are many reasons an organization might want to temporarily rely on overtime to fill vacancies. But there's a point where that strategy becomes self-defeating, and there's a strong argument that Volusia County government crossed that line a few hundred thousand hours ago (at time and a half, to boot).

As The News-Journal's Dustin Wyatt explored in a story earlier this month, county employees logged a collective 627,200 hours of overtime totaling nearly $19 million in the fiscal year that ended Oct. 1. Going back to 2013, the county has paid out nearly $100 million in overtime pay. Over the summer there were times when vacancies peaked at more than 10 percent of the total county workforce, Wyatt found.

The situation could become even worse if state appellate courts override Volusia County residents' right to set the structure of their own county government. If the county loses its challenge to 2018's Amendment 10, it will be immediately forced to set up five new, functionally independent offices -- including the sheriff's office, which is already responsible for a large share of overtime, along with new offices for the clerk, the property appraiser, the elections supervisor and one office that doesn't currently exist, the county tax collector. Each so-called constitutional officer will have to reach an agreement with the county over how to handle its personnel functions, including filling vacancies or hiring temporary staff to meet seasonal surges. And those agreements will likely become caught up in the politics that always surround high-paid elected positions.

But the county doesn't need to borrow trouble. It has plenty on its plate right now: This is the kind of wildfire that can feed on itself. As employees are forced to work additional overtime, they can get burned out. They become less efficient. That could lead to even more overtime. Or it could cause those overworked employees to quit, which leads to ... more overtime.

Even worse, governmental agencies can gain a reputation for being overly demanding and disregarding employees' personal lives -- which makes openings more difficult to fill. And what does that create a need for?

If you said "more overtime," well, yeah.

There's also a direct fiscal hit. While overtime hours might help the county save on health insurance, that savings can be consumed by the fact that many employees' retirement benefits are based on the amount they actually earned (including overtime).

Fortunately, there are ways Volusia County could dig itself out of this hole. Many corporations see vacancies as a chance to re-evaluate workflow and question whether a position could be reconfigured to add more value per salary dollar -- or whether that vacancy really needs to be filled. Have the county's needs changed? What about the skills needed to meet the same ends? Can a particular service be better provided with a private-sector contractor than an in-house employee?

Asking the county's new HR manager -- who until recently held down the same position at the Volusia County School Board -- to come up with ways to conduct this kind of ongoing review could be a good idea.

County Manager George Recktenwald should also draw in elected officials like Sheriff Mike Chitwood to talk about other creative ways to tackle this problem. Chitwood has his share of beefs with the county (including a tussle over whether the county should have added more positions to his budget despite the high vacancy rate) but he's also proven he's willing to consider alternatives to traditional hiring, including using a private contractor to provide courthouse security.

The worst thing Volusia County could do is let things ride; it seems likely a snowball effect has already set in. Nearby counties rack up far less, adjusted for the size of each county's base-budget workforce, Wyatt found.

Recktenwald didn't create this mess, and he famously works so much overtime himself that his middle name might as well be "thank goodness he's salaried." But it would serve the county -- and Volusia taxpayers -- well if he could find better strategies to deal with the overtime problem before it gets worse.

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