Gov. Charlie Baker yesterday cast blame on long-entrenched MBTA practices in part for shocking revelations that workers have been approving their own extra time while on the Swampscott Republican’s watch.
“I do think a lot of it has to do with how things were done. And things aren’t going to be done like that going forward,” Baker told reporters, a day after a pair of preliminary audits slammed the T for inconsistent and unregulated policies around overtime use.
The extra time accounted for more than $75 million last year, including the now-retired maintenance foreman who led all T employees in OT, yet “regularly” approved his own time, helping inflate his $84,822 base salary to a whopping $327,636.
“There’s a reason we asked for the audit in the first place,” Baker said, noting T officials have cut operating expenses across the board through the first half of this fiscal year.
“The good news on this stuff is since the fiscal management control board went into effect, which was last July, there’s been a tremendous focus on operating expenses, overtime, absentee rates and all the rest. … But we obviously have a lot of work that remains to be done.”
Auditors found that the agency lacks formal policies for overtime “across the MBTA” and frontline supervisors often don’t have detailed reports comparing OT use to the budget. Timekeepers also accepted approval sheets that had “preprinted” names of supervisors or managers, raising questions of how their OT were approved.
T spokesman Joe Pesaturo has insisted the practice of workers signing off on their own OT is “not widespread.” One union official representing 500 T machinists maintain they cannot approve their own OT.
Yet the audit showed the MBTA’s top OT earner, who wasn’t part of that union or the T’s largest, the Boston Carmen’s Union Local 589, did OK his own overtime before retiring on Jan. 31.
Under the MBTA’s pension agreement with unions, overtime is not counted toward the “compensation” employees earned in their top three salary years that go into the calculation of their retirement benefits. The number of service years and the age when employees retire are also factored in.
The audits noted that T officials have made moves to improve controls, and overtime is down 28 percent compared to the same period last year. In 2015, for example, the T was spending $154,000 per day on overtime, but through early February, that had dropped to $115,000.
