_elne

The last-three-years retirement bowling lanes you're describing need a US-wide overhaul, but it's definitely not an uncommon occurrence in public service admin anywhere in the states, on a City, State and Federal level.

But the overtime budget breakdown for SF (City and County) was roughly 65% transit, 28% maintenance, 5% enforcement. So admin is < 2% of it.

Those numbers in context are interesting. In FY2011/12 the departmental breakdown of employees exceeding set overtime limits were:

- Transportation: 634 employees

- Fire Department: 378 employees

- Public Health: 115 employees

- Sheriff: 85 employees.

Everyone else in the city - combined - came to just 63 employees. In other words, these are critical positions drawing nearly all of the overtime.

Having worked on stories like these, I'd caution anyone to examine some of the overtime outliers before responding to them.

Often enough the highest visible overtimes on a city budget are social functions, like a sheriff who provides honorary protective detail to stadiums where they are later bizarrely reimbused through that mechanism.

Below that and down-to the median overtimes usually speak for themselves and draw a fair amount of criticism, but otherwise, the vast combined aggregate under the median points out that we don't pay people enough for the jobs they do, and we can't hire enough of them at that price.