Retired Cop Complains To State About Lack Of OT

First Selectman Dan Steward recently said the biggest lesson he has learned in his six years as the town’s leader is that municipal government is not run like a business. A retired police officer's recent complaint to the Connecticut Board of Labor Relations is more evidence of that, he said Wednesday.

This year, a retired police sergeant on terminal leave filed a complaint alleging the town did not give him enough overtime hours. Last week, arguments were heard at a preliminary hearing between town management and the police union. The retired officer did not get the all the overtime he wanted and is complaining the town did not give him top priority, Town Human Resources Director Barbara Aube said.

“We did give him priority,” Aube said. “We just didn’t give him every shift he put in for.”

The Story

The officer, whose name was not released, retired last year and went on terminal leave. Terminal leave allows the officer to collect all unpaid sick and vacation time not used during his tenure as a town employee, about a year’s worth of time in total, Steward said.

During that time, he also worked as a Community Service Officer (CSO) at the police station, a job prioritized to officers on terminal leave through the police contract, Aube said. Because he was a police officer with the most seniority, he would get first priority on all shifts, Aube said.

Also, because he was collecting terminal leave at the time as a retired sergeant, which counts as a 40-hour work week, all shifts he worked as a CSO were considered overtime and paid at sergeant’s rate, Aube said. The base salary of a CSO is $13.50 per hour, while the salary range of a sergeant is $33.92 to $37.36 per hour, meaning the overtime pay of a sergeant is between $50.88 and $56.04, she said. Aube would not release the officer's exact salary.

“He was paid at a much higher rate than the other CSOs,” she said.

The complaint resulted from the officer not receiving all the shifts he put in for as a CSO. He got the priority when he put in on those shifts, but he did not get every single one, Aube said.

Meanwhile fighting this complaint costs taxpayer dollars, as the town needs to retain an attorney, meaning lawyer fees, Aube said.

Also, as the wages for this officer were so much higher than for the other CSOs, the budget for CSOs was spent quicker than expected, Steward said. The police just stopped using CSOs for the last few weeks of the fiscal year, instead having police officers handle the responsibility, he said.

Not The First Complaint

In 2010, another complaint was taken to the State Labor Relations Board involving a similar circumstance. That case, much like the current one, involved a retired officer (Harrison Fortier) on terminal leave working as a CSO.

But instead of shifts, Fortier wanted to receive his uniform allowance (then $1,350), even though he was no longer working as a police officer.

Although he was on terminal leave, once he stopped working as a police officer for 30 days he was no longer considered a police officer by state statute, Aube said. Therefore, the allowance would have gone to a uniform Fortier couldn’t have bought and was illegal for him to wear, Aube said.

The state sided with the town in arbitration.

A Look At Union Complaints

Employees should be able to complain, and those complaints should be listened to, Steward said. But when things get to the point where “you couldn’t make them up,” the state statutes surrounding the complaints become burdensome, he said.

“I think there needs to be some reality checks sometimes with some of the laws,” Steward said. “Sometimes they just don’t make sense. And it's not because the law wasn’t put there for a good reason but it had external effects that weren’t visualized ahead of time.”

State labor relations are often too regulated, and all those rules can rule common sense, he added.

“And it comes to the point that maybe there are too many laws,” Steward said, “and there needs to be some room for common sense.”

Waterford Police Union President John Bunce did not return two Patch emails.