CFD Overtime Issues

Blame the lawyers:

• The Chicago Fire Department will spend $43 million on overtime this year — more than double the amount authorized — because of “legal issues” tied to past discrimination lawsuits that prevented the department from hiring firefighters, a top mayoral aide said Monday.
  
  The Chicago Sun-Times reported Friday that Chicago will hold its first firefighters entrance exam in eight years in 2014 amid runaway overtime that has gone from $13.5 million in 2011 to a projected $35.3 million in 2014.
  
  Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s 2013 budget includes $20 million for Fire Department overtime. But Chicago Fire Commissioner Jose Santiago acknowledged Monday that actual overtime spending will be $43 million.
  
  “There was a series of legal issues that the Fire Department had to work through with the Law Department that actually effectively stopped us from hiring. The city of Chicago could not hire firefighters,” said Santiago, on the hot seat at City Council budget hearings.

Not only does their brass blame the lawyers, they pretty much point out that Rahm is engaged in union busting:

• In marathon contract talks, Emanuel has insisted that “double houses” that include both engines and trucks be staffed by nine firefighters instead of 10. The Chicago Firefighters Union Local 2 has strongly resisted the change.
  
  “When you were having discussions with the Law Department, did anybody bring up the fact that you might have to do more overtime to make up for the loss of manpower? . . . Did anybody do a calculation of what that effect might be?” Waguespack said.
  
  First Deputy Fire Commissioner Charles Stewart said no such calculation was done. But Santiago stressed that the alarm was sounded during “many meetings” with the Law Department and the Office of Budget and Management. “We constantly brought up the fact that we have a problem here. We can’t hire. We have people retiring. You’ve got to help us out. We have a hiring plan we put together and we could not implement it,” Santiago said. “Many meetings were conducted. It was always brought up to them [that], ‘We need help somehow. We need to hire people or the overtime is going to go right through the ceiling,’ which it has.”
  
  Waguespack persisted, wondering whether it was “mandatory not to hire” or optional.
  
  Stewart replied, “It was strongly recommended that, until the legal issues are resolved, that we not hire a class. We made sure they were aware of manning needs. But that was their recommendation we had to follow.”

So pretty much, Rahm was gambling with citizens' lives while playing accounting politics. You know, like the spike in murders during 2012, resulting in the CPD burning through the entire overtime budget in 5 months and then adding some $40-to-50 million to it in 2013.