Key parts of state government are dangerously understaffed, and the result has been an expensive jump in the amount of overtime being paid to overworked corrections, mental health and veterans affairs workers.
Tulsa World reporter Curtis Killman had an eye-opening look Sunday at the amount of overtime being paid to state workers. Thirty-four state agencies accounted for $32.5 million in overtime in 2014.
Some of the stories Killman reported were amazing. One 72-year-old mental health nurse earned $62,420 in overtime pay in 2014 (on top of about $47,643 in regular pay). In one two-week period, she worked 13 16-hour shifts.
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At the Department of Public Safety, one officer worked nearly 1,000 hours of overtime in one year, which means he was working an average of nearly 60 hours a week, every week.
At the Department of Veterans Affairs, overtime costs have increased 114 percent since 2010.
The overtime situation is most disturbing in the state prison system, where understaffing is a routine crisis.
Nearly 100 guards logged more than 1,000 hours of overtime each in 2014. One guard worked more than 1,400 overtime hours. Since 2010, one corrections officer has earned more than $150,000 in overtime pay.
Guards tell of routine mandatory overtime, repeated 12-hour shifts and cajoling, threatening calls from supervisors trying to get them to report for work on their few days off.
Understaffing critical areas of state government — the people keeping inmates behind bars and providing care to mental health patients and aging veterans — is not just expensive. It’s dangerous, for the workers, the people they work with and the public.
If an overworked guard feels like a walking zombie in a facility where the prisoners outnumber the correctional officers 400-to-1, the opportunities for every imaginable bad scenario is magnified.
There is a solution to the problem: Pay state employees a competitive wage and hire enough of them to do the job right. But that requires realistic assumptions about the mission, cost and necessity of state government among those who make the dollars-and-cents decisions at the state Capitol.
It’s much easier to simply maintain the crisis, keeping state workers underpaid, overworked and endangered.