State paid $80 million in overtime last year

COLUMBUS - Overtime by state workers increased by 20 percent last year that included one employee who nearly tripled his base salary by working an average of 94 hours a week. A nursing shortage fueled the increase in part.

The state paid $80.1 million in overtime to employees last year, about 3 percent of the $2.74 billion state payroll. The 1999 figure was $65.7 million.

Those figures come from a computer analysis of payroll records for 75,933 state employees by The Columbus Dispatch, which published results of the study yesterday.

It said state employees worked 3.1 million hours of overtime in 2000, paid at a rate of time-and-a-half of their regular hourly pay.

The worker who earned the most in overtime pay was Maurice Franck, a nurse at Orient Correctional Institution. His $101,368 overtime pay almost tripled his base salary and made him the 22nd highest paid employee in state government at $165,147, earning $42,000 more than Gov. Bob Taft did.

A nationwide nursing shortage is partly responsible for the substantial amount of overtime worked year after year by Ohio prison nurses, said Joe Andrews, a spokesman for the Department of Rehabilitation and Correction.

Records show Franck worked 2,805 hours in addition to the 2,080-hour standard work year in 2000.

The analysis said 1,136 state employees earned $10,000 or more for working overtime last year. That figure included 103 nurses or nursing supervisors.

Prisons had the largest overtime payout of any state agency, $25.3 million, or 32 percent of the total.

Taft spokesman Kevin Kellems said each state agency is responsible for trying to hold down overtime, especially in light of Taft's decision to cut the budgets of many state agencies.

"The department heads are on notice that they have to meet a target number for their budget cuts. That's been reduced twice already," Kellems said.

Sick time for state workers cost taxpayers $67.1 million last year.