Hoover council changes overtime pay calculations for police, detention officers

The Hoover City Council on Monday night voted to change the way overtime is calculated for Hoover police and detention officers.

Since 2000, Hoover police officers have been paid overtime only if they worked more than 43 hours in a week, City Administrator Allan Rice said. That change was implemented by former Mayor Brian Skelton.

While the Fair Labor Standards Act allows that practice, current Mayor Frank Brocato said he believes it’s more fair to allow police officers to be paid overtime for any work over 40 hours, just like employees in other city departments. Similarly, detention officers, who work seven 12-hour shifts every two weeks, will be paid overtime for anything over 80 hours in those two weeks.

In a worst case scenario, this change could cost the city about $500,000, but it more likely will cost about $300,000 a year, Brocato said.

The change has met some opposition, however. David Wright, a Hoover police officer with almost 24 years with the city, said it sounds like a great thing to do, but in reality will end up reducing retirement pay because it affects the amount of base pay that is counted toward officers’ retirement.

Officers no longer can claim those extra three hours as part of their base pay, which will reduce their retirement pay by 10.5 percent if they retire when they are first able to, Wright said.

Rice and Brocato confirmed that the city has changed the way it reports base pay to the Retirement Systems of Alabama, but only because RSA informed the city that it has been incorrectly reporting base pay for many years.

The practice in the past has been to report that police officers were working 43 hours per week even if they only worked 40 hours per week, and RSA has said the city cannot do that.

Brocato said the city is complying with RSA rules, and the bottom line is that some people want to get credit for working 43 hours even if they only worked 40 hours. “We can’t do that. We can’t lie,” Brocato said.

Wright disagrees with the city’s decision and has filed a notice that he intends to sue the city, but the city is not going to reverse its decision, Brocato said. Wright has the right to sue, and if a judge says RSA is wrong, the city will make the adjustment, the mayor said.

But the decision about retirement pay is a distinctly separate issue from the overtime pay and shouldn’t be confused, Rice said.

Four council members — John Greene, Casey Middlebrooks, Derrick Murphy and Curt Posey — voted in favor of changing the way overtime is calculated, while Councilmen John Lyda, Mike Shaw and Gene Smith abstained from the vote.

Greene, a former Birmingham police officer, said police officers deserve to be treated just like any other city employee. Middlebrooks concurred and said he had spoken to a number of police officers and they were all in favor of the change in calculating overtime.

Hoover police Chief Nick Derzis said he, too, had spoken to quite a few police officers about it, and a majority of those were in favor of it as well.

Councilman Mike Shaw said it’s within the mayor’s authority to make the change without council approval, and due to the threat of litigation, he was not comfortable voting on the matter.

Lyda said the mayor is the elected executive of the city and he was comfortable allowing the mayor to make executive decisions such as this.

The mayor said he could have gone ahead and made the change himself, like Skelton did in 2000, but he wanted to make it more difficult for any future mayors to undo the action by involving the council as well.