California County Doubled Overtime Spending Since 2018

SACRAMENTO -- Staffing shortages and around-the-clock obligations for its law enforcement officers, social workers and other employees have led Sacramento County to nearly double its spending on overtime pay since 2018, an analysis by The Sacramento Bee shows.

The spending continues a yearslong trend locally and among other California municipalities that increasingly rely on overtime to meet staffing needs, providing many employees with additional income, but also leading to strains on some employees and their families.

“We have over 100 sworn (officer) vacancies throughout the Sheriff’s Office,” said Sgt. Amar Gandhi, a spokesperson for the Sheriff’s Office. “Those vacancies do not negate our responsibility to fulfill the work those positions require, and are often back-filled with overtime.”

The county spent about $63 million on overtime in 2023, up from $34 million in 2018, data obtained through a Public Records Act request shows. Among the 10 most populous counties in California, Sacramento increased its use of overtime the most during that five-year period, although several rural counties increased their overtime expenditures even more.

In Sacramento County, the biggest jump was at the Sheriff’s Office, where overtime pay rose to $30 million in 2023 from about $13 million in 2018, a roughly 90% increase after adjusting for inflation.

Nearly all of the 21 county employees who earned more than $100,000 in overtime last year were rank-and-file sheriff’s deputies and sergeants.

Many of those employees were homicide detectives and others who are called out to investigations day and night, in addition to working their regular shifts, Gandhi said. Others had to work overtime so that the understaffed department could meet court-ordered minimum staffing levels at the county jails, Gandhi said.

About 10% of the total wages paid to Sheriff’s Office employees came in the form of overtime, the data shows. And while employees may welcome the added income, working those long hours takes its toll, Gandhi and other experts said.

“It is important to note that all of these overtime hours were physically worked by our employees, with time spent away from their families to ensure their missions were accomplished,” he said.

The situation is slowly starting to improve, Gandhi said, amid increased outreach, recruiting and training for new officers. Sacramento County’s staffing needs are higher than many because the Sheriff’s Office is one of the largest in the state, he said.

“Virtually all law enforcement agencies nationwide are having staffing shortages,” Gandhi said. “The numbers are slowly creeping back in our favor with new recruiting efforts and academy classes running year-round, but it will take time.”

Other departments also spent significant amounts on overtime. The county paid $2.3 million in overtime at the Department of Waste Management and Recycling, or about 9% of all wages paid by that department. It spent $6.1 million at the Department of Child, Family and Adult Services, about 6% of all wages paid by that department and up from $3.7 million in 2018.

Overall, however, the county does not rely on overtime as much as other parts of California. The $63 million spent last year in Sacramento County amounted to about 5% of the total wages paid to employees — less than the 7% on average of employee wages made up by overtime in other counties.

Staff shortages and 24/7 needs

Driving the increase is a combination of staffing shortages in some departments as well as the need for some roles to be covered 24 hours a day and seven days a week, leading to overtime if someone calls in sick or needs to respond to an emergency after hours, said county spokeswoman Kim Nava.

There are currently 1,415 vacancies in the county’s 13,675-person workforce, Nava said, a vacancy rate of just over 10%. The county has held several job fairs over the past year, the most recent of which included 26 departments and attracted 1,100 potential applicants.

At the Department of Health Services, where overtime totaled about $3.6 million in 2023, the extra hours were centered around facilities such as health care provided in county jail facilities that require staffing 24 hours per day, Nava said. The hours have been needed to cover for positions that have become vacant amid ongoing staffing issues in the health care services field, she said.

At the Department of Human Assistance, staff and any overtime they accrued became more expensive as cost-of-living increases kicked in, Nava said.

The $6.2 million in overtime paid last year at that department centered on extensive training that was required on new systems used to help people apply for benefits. In addition, considerable work over the past several years has involved determining whether people were eligible for pandemic-era benefits, and then on whether their eligibility changed after the public health emergency ended, she said.

Those efforts “created additional work that could not be done with the same level of staff,” she said.

The overtime at the Department of Child, Family and Adult Services was largely centered around the need for 24/7 staffing at three homes for foster youth, as well as on-call and emergency work that requires social workers to be on-call or working beyond their regular shifts, Nava said.

“When staff call out sick or have vacation, we need others to provide coverage,” she said.

Are politics at play as overtime costs mount?

Throughout California, cities and counties have been relying on increasing amounts of overtime to keep their services humming.

In 2023, Sacramento was among eight counties with an increase in overtime expenses of 50% or more compared to 2018. Sacramento’s near-doubling of overtime expenses amounts to about a 52% rise after adjusting for inflation. Yuba County increased its overtime expenditures by 62% after inflation, while Sierra County’s rose by 75%.

Overtime also increased in the city of Sacramento. The city paid about $55 million in overtime to its workers in 2023, up from $38 million in 2018. Much of the city’s overtime goes to personnel in its fire department, most of whom are also certified paramedics.

As the trend toward using more overtime began to speed up over the past decade, several cities and counties said it was cheaper to pay overtime than hire new employees, which would bring new long-term pension obligations to governments’ already strapped budgets.

But Sacramento County officials say they’d like to hire new staff to fill the needed roles.

“The county does not use OT to reduce its staff or need to hire,” said Nava. “Generally, OT is used when the volume of work or caseloads exceed that of existing staff or when needed to meet operational needs while recruiting for vacant positions.”

Robert Wassmer, a public policy professor at Sacramento State who has studied municipal finance, said pension and training obligations — as well as a certain amount of politics — are likely playing a role in decisions by cities and counties to rely more on overtime.

He cited the city of Sacramento’s extremely close recent mayoral election as an example of how politics could be affecting the decision of whether to hire more law enforcement officers.

Mayor-elect Kevin McCarty said during the campaign that he would increase the Police Department’s budget. His opponent, Flojaune Cofer, said that over time she would reduce it, and used language from the “defund the police” movement that sprang up amid concern over police shootings of unarmed Black men throughout the U.S.

McCarty won the election, but it took nearly a month to count all the ballots, and his victory was razor-thin — he prevailed by just 1941 votes in a city with more than a half-million people.

“There may be a political cost to hiring more police and going down that road,” Wassmer said. “There’s an ideological divide that city council members and county supervisors don’t want to get on one side of or the other.”

Relying on overtime instead, he said, avoids that whole discussion.

“I think it’s the politics more than the economics — and I’m an economist,” he said.