Report: State OT tops $100M

With overtime, one state corrections worker earned $160,000, which is $27,000 more than the governor.

COLUMBUS (AP) — Overtime for state employees increased 16 percent during the first year of Gov. Ted Strickland’s administration, topping $100 million for the first time, a newspaper reported Sunday.

State troopers protecting the governor, firefighters at Air National Guard bases, medical personnel at state hospitals and prisons, and computer experts were among those receiving big overtime payments, according to a computer analysis by The Columbus Dispatch.

The newspaper found that 11 employees received at least $50,000 in overtime, and 2,167 had overtime payments of $10,000 or more.

Part of the jump resulted from the changeover in administrations from Gov. Bob Taft to Strickland, said Ron Sylvester, a spokesman for the Ohio Department of Administrative Services, which provided payroll data to The Dispatch.

The majority of state employees received a 3.5 percent raise last year, Sylvester said. Strickland, a Democrat, also froze the pay of about 3,400 higher level staff members.

The total state payroll rose $116 million from 2006 to 2007.

For the first three months after Strickland took office last January, as many as 200 positions were temporarily “double-filled,” Sylvester said, meaning that new employees were hired while the previous employees, many of them Republican appointees from the Taft administration, were still on the payroll.

In addition, overtime and payroll increased because employees put in thousands of hours responding to the theft of a computer backup device carrying the Social Security numbers of thousands of Ohioans and other sensitive data, Sylvester said.

Overtime increases showed up across state agencies, the newspaper reported.

At the Ohio Department of Transportation, where overtime increased 40 percent to $16 million, 362 employees got more than $10,000 each in overtime last year, compared with 235 in 2006.

Department spokesman Scott Varner said the increase was largely a result of extra hours put in by snow removal crews during a February 2007 blizzard and widespread flooding that occurred later in the year. Employees work 12-hour days in those situations, he said.

The analysis also showed that the number of people earning six figures increased by nearly 16 percent as part of the state’s $3.2 billion payroll.

The state’s top overtime earner last year was Melody Campbell, a nurse employed at the Corrections Medical Center in Orient. She was paid $81,495 in overtime, boosting her total pay above $160,000 — well over the $133,000 that Strickland was paid last year.

Of the top 25 overtime-earners, 11 were prison or psychiatric nurses.