For Austin's fire, police and emergency medical professionals, overtime is just a fact of life. In the last budget year, overtime spending on those three departments was $84 million, according to city payroll data.
But after years of ballooning overtime payouts, Austin is throttling back some of that spending, asking its fire and police departments to cut millions in overtime, while pushing city staff to monitor how much the city spends and where it could spend smarter.
How much does the city spend on overtime?
The biggest overtime spender – by far – is the Austin Police Department. It makes sense. Police staff cover Austin's special events like SXSW and ACL. On top of that, the department has been short-staffed for the better part of a decade.
APD had initially budgeted around $25 million for overtime for the 2024 budget, but spent nearly double that.
Why are cuts needed?
Austin faced a $33-million hole in its budget, and City Council is asking Austinites for additional money through a tax rate election.
It's also asking departments to spend less and that includes on overtime.
District 5 Council Member Ryan Alter said the city's overtime expenses are often unpredictable.
"We need to understand why is that happening," he said. "Why do we keep seeing more and more overtime than we're expecting? Some of it has been due to staffing issues, but we should be able to properly account for that and predict that."
On top of that, some public safety employees have used overtime to pad their salaries.
For example, 41 APD officers made at least $100,000 in overtime last year. On average, their take-home pay was nearly $260,000. For context, just three Austin firefighters clocked in for six-figures of OT last year.
Nelly Paulina Ramirez, chair of the city's Public Safety Commission, said too much overtime can lead to poor decision-making during police interactions and, ultimately, to burnout. She points to a study from the Police Executive Research Forum and another from the National Institutes for Health.
"I don't want to have to come into a police interaction where a police officer is on their 56th hour of the week," she said. "Nobody should have to. I want somebody that's on their 35th hour ... looking forward to clocking out for the week."
What's the solution?
For APD, the solution isn't as simple as hiring. While the department has said it's going to focus more on recruitment, it's been hard for cities across the country to hire cops over the last couple years.
Ramirez, with the Public Safety Commission, said the city needs to take pressure off APD. She argued officers shouldn't respond to every mental health call or traffic crash. Some of that can be done by civilian personnel. Though, she admited, that would mean big changes for a department that will also see substantial raises this year.
"If we really lean in to our civilian staff, I think we could eradicate a lot of overtime, if not all of our time," she said.
A recently released city-backed study of APD's operations agrees: It suggested Austin use more civilian staff to take some pressure off overworked officers.
Council Member Alter is backing a measure to do just that.
"We're going to have to do things a little differently, and that's going to be uncomfortable for some people, but that doesn't mean that we can't do it," he said.
In the meantime, the Austin Police Department is cutting overtime by $9 million, revamping its structure to focus more on patrols and less on some specialized, overtime-heavy work.
Alter's also asking city staff to monitor how much Austin's spending on overtime year-round.
"We can't have overtime just consume the budget," Alter said. "The public safety entities already take up such a huge part of our part of our budget, but if we go over ... our overtime costs ... that has real impacts on the rest of the budget."
