Road to Riches: Overtime at City Road Division
11/15/2010
Sara Lin/Civil Beat
Editor's Note: This story is the first of three about the use of overtime at the Honolulu Road Division. Read the rest of our coverage:
- Road to Riches Part 1: Overtime at City Road Division
- Road to Riches Part 2: City Workers Claimed 5,525 Overtime Hours for Illegal Stream Dumping
- Road to Riches Part 3: Getting Paid for Overtime Work — Twice
A small group of people in the Honolulu Road Maintenance Division made big bucks in overtime, a Civil Beat investigation found.
- Five workers made more in overtime than regular pay.
- They each logged more than 1,200 overtime hours in one year, with one filing claims for 1,582.5 hours of OT, or the equivalent of 39.5 regular work weeks.
- One construction worker wracked up so much OT that she earned more than $100,000.
- Some rank and file employees earned more than management through overtime.
- A manager regularly scheduled 10-hour shifts to "monitor overtime"
The review of two years of overtime records also found possible double-charging, with workers claiming overtime twice on the same day for different jobs performed at overlapping times. (The city says it didn't pay employees twice.) And it revealed that the illegal dumping of concrete rubble into Maiilili Stream in Waianae, for which the city has been fined $1.7 million, involved far more overtime, including on weekends, than the city previously reported.
Neither the Road Division chief, Tyler Sugihara, nor his boss, the director of Honolulu's Department of Facilities Maintenance, George "Keoki" Miyamoto, would answer questions from Civil Beat. The city is conducting an internal investigation of the division.
