DAVID SEIFMAN
Courtesy of NY1 News
Overtime spending by city agencies - especially the Police Department - went through the roof last year after the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center, a new report shows.
The city's management report issued yesterday found that the city tore through $496.7 million in OT during the first four months of fiscal 2002 - July 1 to Oct. 31.
That represented an 88 percent increase over the $264.3 million shelled out during the same period in 2000.
Not surprisingly, the NYPD accounted for the bulk of the spending, absorbing $272.4 million. The federal government is expected to pick up a huge chunk of the tab.
Fire Department overtime hit $82.3 million, compared to $35.8 million during the same period the year before.
Sanitation workers assigned to the monumental cleanup effort walked off with $27.2 million in overtime - nearly double their take in 2000.
All the figures were contained in two thick volumes of the Mayor's Management Report, a semi-annual measure of the performance of city agencies.
Since the data were collected only through Oct. 31, it doesn't account for much of the city work related to 9/11.
Smaller agencies were also impacted, the report showed.
The relatively tiny Department of Employment spent $16 million on overtime after its staffers were assigned to jobs hot lines. In the same period of 2000, the agency spent $9 million for OT.
The Probation Department defied the trend for a simple reason: four of its offices were shut. Reassigned probation officers took in just $389,000 in OT, down from $551,000.
Routine city services were clobbered as resources were diverted to the unprecedented emergency.
Cops returned 9,434 truants to school between July 1 and Oct. 30, compared to 18,732 in the same period in 2000.
The NYPD also gave out fewer parking tickets, didn't arrest as many prostitutes and eased an anti-peddler drive.
Although the indicators were compiled during the Giuliani administration, they were issued by Mayor Bloomberg.Deputy Mayor Marc Shaw said the weighty documents had grown unwieldy and would be revamped.
"The way to provide clarity in management is not to provide a massive number of indicators, but to work with agencies and other users to develop the right indicators of agency program performance," said Shaw in a letter to the City Council.
