Campbell officials battle overtime costs

By jeanne starmack

starmack@vindy.com

campbell

The city’s administrators are going to battle against high overtime costs for full-time police and firefighters.

“Appropriations are going to have to be reviewed to try to keep the general fund in a spending surplus,” said Tim Linter, a financial supervisor on a commission that oversees the city while it’s in fiscal emergency. The commission met Monday morning.

The most overspending is in the police and fire departments, he said. The departments should have spent 42 percent of their budgets by this time of year, but police is at 61 percent and fire is at 71 percent.

“If spending continues at this pace, they have to adjust appropriations, but there’s not a lot of wiggle room in the general fund,” Lintner said.

Council President George Levendis and Mayor Bill VanSuch said that it would cost more to hire another police officer than it would cost for overtime.

The city can’t hire another firefighter because it has planned a transition to a volunteer fire department. It will not replace the four full-time firefighters as they retire.

Levendis said the police department is at “bare minimum as is.”

“I don’t know if you can make a cut,” he said.

The city uses auxiliary police and volunteer firefighters now but must offer full-timers the overtime first.

VanSuch said he intends to meet with both chiefs “to get a handle on overtime.”

The city also must amend its beginning cash balances that the Mahoning County Auditor’s office certified Jan. 1, said Finance Director Michael Evanson.

The city had $61,343 less in the bank than its books showed, he reported Monday to the commission.

The state auditor’s office found mistakes on “everything under the sun” in accounting records from Jan. 1, 2010, to Dec. 31, 2011 — including checks that were posted with wrong amounts, Evanson said.

One check that cleared the bank Jan. 5 should have been booked as $69,391 but was booked at $3,258, he noted.

Some receipts were misclassified.

“You have a series of different funds or categories, and if you put something in the wrong category, you think you have more money than you really do,” he said.

Evanson said the deficit does not represent an insurmountable problem to an operation the size of the city.

Evanson, who took the finance post in late January, said the city’s finance department should have caught the mistakes.

Now that the records are corrected, the finance department can reconcile the city’s books to monthly bank statements. A backlog of unreconciled statements was a big reason the city could not ask for release from fiscal emergency in December.

The city’s previous finance director had problems doing the reconciliations, and VanSuch let him go. By the time he left in January, the books were reconciled through May 2010.