By Marcia Gelbart
The Philadelphia Inquirer
PHILADELPHIA — The Philadelphia Sheriff’s Office, asked by the Nutter administration to cut spending more than $2 million, on Tuesday offered this simple answer: We can’t.
“We have not been successful,” Connie Little, executive assistant to Sheriff John Green, told a meeting of representatives from several city criminal-justice agencies.
The problem, she said, is that overtime hours worked by Sheriff’s Office employees depend on the city’s courts and are largely outside the sheriff’s control.
An independently elected official with about 240 full-time employees, the sheriff budgeted $12.3 million for the fiscal year that ends June 30, but his office is projected to spend $2.2 million more, mostly on overtime.
“We have been asking them to provide us with a plan of how they would address this pretty sizable overexpenditure, and if they could try to reduce their overtime,” city Budget Director Steve Agostini said.
While the office had anticipated spending $1.3 million in overtime, expenditures will approach $3.3 million.
The Sheriff’s Office said it had little control over overtime costs largely driven by the needs of the city court system, which relies on sheriff’s employees to maintain security in and around courtrooms.
Little did not name names, but she said the overtime problem was made worse by certain judges who regularly keep their courtrooms open past 6 p.m. or 7 p.m. Most sheriff’s employees begin accumulating overtime at 4 p.m., she said.
In addition, Traffic Court is typically open through 7 p.m.
Responding to a suggestion that those judges simply be told to shut down earlier, Little said that was easier said than done. “Some of these judges have a mind of their own. They do as they please,” she said.
Judges have no standard hours.
They may stay on the bench longer on some days than others for many reasons, such as completing witness testimony, or if a witness who was tough to get into a courtroom had actually appeared that day, said David Lawrence, court administrator for the First Judicial District.
Little balked when Assistant District Attorney Sarah V. Hart suggested that an adjustment be made in the hours that sheriff’s deputies work, saying that was difficult because of the multiple and sometimes unrelated tasks those deputies perform in a given shift.
But Hart asked if the goal ought to be to make the courts run more efficiently for the sake of justice rather than “make the court change the way it does business to adjust to the sheriff’s schedule.”
In the end, members of the Criminal Justice Advisory Board agreed to form a small working group to determine how to drive overtime costs down.
As part of that goal, the Sheriff’s Office said it would provide firm numbers detailing how much overtime was generated at the Criminal Justice Center as opposed to other city courts, as well as at the Philadelphia Parking Authority, where the Sheriff’s Office also has employees.
“I find it curious that people are complaining that judges are working late,” Lawrence said. “You can’t win.”
Copyright 2010 Philadelphia Newspapers, LLC