Edmonton Staff Overtime Pay $39M In 2022, Excluding Police

Local News

Some employees are working excessive overtime — at least 20 people worked more than 600 hours extra last year.

Published Jun 28, 2023 • Last updated 53 minutes ago • 3 minute read

Edmonton city hall file image Wet streets reflect the lights from Edmonton city hall on Sept. 19, 2022. Photo by Greg Southam /Postmedia, file

The City of Edmonton spent $39 million on staff overtime last year across all departments excluding police, an audit that revealed rising spending has found.

A new report from the independent city auditor shows overtime pay increased by $10 million in one year. Payouts in 2022 were about $17 million higher than 2018, a 77 per cent increase in four years. Overtime pay made up about three per cent of the $1.165 billion spent on city personnel last year.

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Some employees are working excessive overtime — at least 20 people worked more than 600 hours extra last year.

The audit, presented at city council’s audit committee Tuesday, found the employee services department doesn’t monitor staff absences, overtime, and earned days off at the citywide level as they are required and expected to do. This department doesn’t give regular reports to upper management except for vacation days, and doesn’t track if the city’s various business areas are managing the risks related to absences and overtime.

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“Strengthening the support to business areas is important to hold them accountable for their responsibility of managing absences and overtime, and using public funds and resources responsibly. It is also important to identify business risks,” the report states.

Meantime, Edmonton Police Service also reported an increase in overtime spending — $15.9 million in 2022, up from $10.3 million in 2021. This audit does not analyze EPS spending.

By comparison, the City of Calgary spent an average of $30.1 million on overtime annually — including police pay — between 2017 and 2020.

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For other staff paid with municipal dollars, workers in the city operations department — transit, waste services, parks and roads including snow removal, and fleet and facility services — worked the most overtime last year followed by Edmonton Fire Rescue Services and community services.

Some departments don’t limit added hours per employee — one person worked 936 overtime hours worth $109,217 last year, the auditor found.

Four employees with the same job each worked more than 650 overtime hours in 2022, and three of them were among the top 20 overtime earners for five years in a row.

“Overtime in this area is caused by needing to fill shifts on an ongoing basis — not because of seasonal work,” the audit states.

The auditor recommends the employee services department strengthen its support for tracking and managing overtime and absences so they can hold other departments accountable, and that they give staff consistent guidance for tracking and monitoring.

City administration accepted the recommendations.

Much of the overtime in 2022 came from Edmonton Transit Service and the fire department because of staffing issues and delayed training related to the COVID-19 pandemic, city staff told councillors.

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Coun. Andrew Knack is optimistic changes will be made to reduce the excess spending. But he wants this to be monitored closely, although he appreciates the COVID-19 pandemic created issues.

“If you go through that list of top 20 overtime earners … gosh, that feels like you could have taken a similar amount of money and hired an entire additional person,” he said. “You get more work being done. You don’t risk burnout of the folks who are doing that kind of work.

“If that type of spend is happening each and every year, I think we need to be asking ourselves if we could be getting better value by having permanent staff and achieving overall better outcome for Edmontonians.”

Steve Bradshaw, president for ATU Local 569, said the union would prefer the city hire more transit workers to give more people full-time and permanent jobs than relying on overtime.

“We want our members to have a valuable work-life balance. When you spend too much time working overtime, you’re not getting that,” he said.

He said wages aren’t keeping up with inflation, which could make it difficult for the city to attract and retain transit workers.

Sick pay and absences also rose to $74 million in 2022 from $63 million in 2021. Apart from 2020 ($65 million), spending was consistent at $63 million for the last four years.

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