In what Ward 4 Coun. Pauline Fortin previously signalled might spur a deeper dive into city budgets, additional information has been released in relation to city overtime pay.
Last year, the city spent $9,142,494 on overtime, far exceeding that year’s budget of $3,927,381.
It was a slight drop from the $10,185,891 spent on overtime in 2022, but remains greater than the pre-pandemic year of 2019, when $6,188,490 was spent.
Overtime pay is funded mainly from the city’s budgets for salaries and benefits.
These numbers were tabled in a report prepared for the June 18 finance and administration committee meeting of city council, which aims to supplement information released last month.
At last month’s meeting, Fortin said overtime is “an area we can look at for finding savings, because paying someone at time-and-a-half or double-time is a lot more expensive than paying that regular time.”
(CUPE Local 4705’s collective bargaining agreement affords time-and-a-half for most overtime worked, and double-time on Sundays)
“This is an area where we might find savings without cutting services,” Fortin said, referring to the city’s overtime hours far exceeding budgeted amounts as “an absolute red light.”
This assertion came in response to city Corporate Services General Manager Kevin Fowke saying that the city’s current overtime situation “isn’t the flashing red light on the dashboard for us.”
Sudbury.com reached out to Fortin for comment in reaction to the city’s latest report on Monday, but did not receive a response by the end of the day.
Last year, city employees’ overtime hours (183,028) as a percentage of actual hours worked (3,187,406) was 5.7 per cent, which Fowke said does not cause him concern and doesn’t stick out against other sectors.
Sudbury.com reached out to city communications staff and the Association of Municipalities of Ontario (AMO) requesting information on municipal comparators to see how Greater Sudbury stacks up when it comes to overtime. The city responded by saying they did not have these comparators readily available, which an AMO spokesperson reaffirmed from their end.
“Overtime is not a metric that has standard municipal reporting requirements,” a city spokesperson said. “To obtain this number we would likely need to review the budget documents of various municipalities and their actual results reporting for this type of data.”
Although it’s now dated, the City of Guelph conducted an internal audit report on overtime in 2013 in which they set a target of 2.5 per cent of base salaries for corporate-wide overtime in 2014.
“Using the municipal benchmark data collected for the audit, a reasonable overtime target for actual overtime expenditures (cash only) would be approximately 2 per cent to 2.5 per cent of total base salary and wages,” according to the report.
This report also revealed that Greater Sudbury’s overtime pay as a percentage of base pay was the greatest among nine Ontario municipal comparators in 2012.
Greater Sudbury’s overtime as a percentage of base pay was 5.58 per cent, which was followed by Guelph (4.06 per cent), Halton Region (3.73 per cent), Cambridge (3.12 per cent), City of Waterloo (2.02 per cent), Burlington (1.85 per cent), Hamilton (1.48 per cent), Kitchener (1.2 per cent) and Wellington County (0.61 per cent).
More recently, the City of Edmonton released an employee absences and overtime audit on June 9, 2023, which revealed a $39-million overtime expenditure against their $795-million base salary budget (representing 5.1 per cent) and spurred recommendations around monitoring and managing overtime.
Last year’s top contributors to City of Greater Sudbury overtime hour expenses were:
- Fire Services: $2.36 million (35,499 hours, which represented 11 per cent of regular hours worked in this department)
- Long-term care senior services: $1.69 million (44,648 hours, 6.4 per cent of hours)
- Emergency medical services: $992,858 (24,842 hours, 6.7 per cent of hours)
- Transit: $428,929 (10,758 hours, 4.6 per cent of hours)
- Leisure/Recreation: $426,499 (10,322 hours, 3.6 per cent of hours)
The reason for each department’s overtime hours is listed in a report available by clicking here. Fire Services’ reason was that three overtime shifts were required per day to meet minimum staffing levels. During 2024/25 budget deliberations, city council agreed to hire four additional full-time firefighters to help fill this gap.
In addition to debating the city’s overtime hours, last month’s city council discussion also touched on city staff’s delivery of information.
The motion Fortin tabled on Jan. 30, 2024, called for the city to share “actual versus budgeted overtime hours and costs” for 2019-2023. The resultant report released on May 22 did not include costs, which is why it’s being retabled with additional information for the June 18 meeting.
Despite assurance the report would be re-tabled with the requested information, and finance and administration committee chair and Ward 9 Coun. Deb McIntosh reminding her colleagues that there were no decision points on May 22, Ward 7 Coun. Natalie Labbée vented her frustration at city staff for not sharing the full breadth of requested information that day.
“I’m really super annoyed right now,” she said, adding that the lack of decision point that day was “neither here nor there. It’s ridiculous.”
Labbée has criticized city staff’s delivery of information to city council a few times in recent weeks, describing it as leaving her “blindsided over and over.”
Labbée criticized staff for not sharing information around last year’s wage hikes in time for 2024/25 budget meetings (staff and some members of city council said this information was shared). She also criticized staff for not being forthcoming with an upcoming $5 landfill fee (the fee was included in the 2024/25 budget document, increases in user-fees was flagged by city CAO Ed Archer during a pre-budget meeting, and the new fee was also highlighted in a question-and-answer document shared with both city council and the general public online before budget deliberations commenced).
The June 18 finance and administration committee meeting will begin at 6 p.m., and can be viewed in-person at Tom Davies Square or livestreamed by clicking here.
Tyler Clarke covers city hall and political affairs for Sudbury.com.
