Steve Thurston (2021)
A police officer at a city council meeting, Nov. 16, 2021.
The Saratoga Springs police officers union has agreed to a change in their contract that would move most officers from regular 12-hour shifts to 10-hour shifts, would give longevity bonuses to officers, would increase the pay that officers receive for working night shifts and other hazardous duties, and would make Travers Day at the Saratoga Race Course a holiday for overtime purposes.
The Saratoga Springs City Council discussed the memorandum of understanding but did not vote on it at their meeting Tuesday evening, June 21. Commissioner of Public Safety James Montagnino, who brought the MOU before the council, faced stiff questioning about the cost and breadth of the changes.
The council seemed to agree with Montagnino’s assessment that a 12-hour shift for an officer might exhaust an officer to the point that a mistake, possibly a lethal one, could be made. This is especially true for officers who have worked overtime, a rather common occurrence.
Montagnino has maintained since he took office this year that officers forced into overtime might work three, 16-hour shifts in a row, with just eight hours off between.
He referred to a federal government report that he said finds the 12-hour shift to be “inherently unsafe.”
"We've worked out something that follows the DOJ report's recommendation as to what I would refer to as a 'sweet spot.' The sweet spot is a 10-hour day, four days a week,” Montagnino told the board. Officers still work 40 hours per week to earn base pay, and an officer could work only four hours of overtime at the end of one shift, but could not work overtime on two shifts in a row, the MOU says.
The idea behind the 10-hour shift is to allow police to work a four day week and take every other weekend off. This would give the department the coverage it needs while improving the quality of life for the officers, Montagnino said.
In a story last March, union President Dan Mullan said that the eight-hour shifts made regular weekends off almost impossible. The police at the time were working 12-hour shifts, after negotiating away from eight-hour shifts last year. Mullan said in March that Montaganino’s move to change shift lengths again, after only 10 months, was demoralizing. Mullan did not return calls seeking comment for this story.
[Read our previous coverage here.]
The city council largely agreed during their meeting Tuesday evening, June 21, that the safety and well-being of the officers was important and the shift in schedules would be welcome.
"I’m all in favor of 10-hour shifts,” said Commissioner of Finance Minita Sanghvi.
Commissioner of Accounts Dillon Moran added later that the change "seems to provide a good balance.”
However, the city council saw large budgetary numbers and not enough data to back them up.
For the rest of 2022, the change would cost about $175,000 Montagnino told the board, but the public safety budget has money allocated that has not been spent, and it could be used here, Montagnino said.
In the coming year, the budget need grows to $550,000 or $600,000, Montagnino said.
The budget grows that much in part because the new MOU includes the longevity bonuses and because the "shift differentials" — or pay increases for late-night and holiday shifts — are at times double, or more, of what they were. The 4 p.m. to midnight shift differential jumps from $0.80 to $2.07 per hour under the new MOU.
"These numbers seem really, really, really high," Sanghvi said as she read them off. "Can we sustain these kinds of figures, especially with a recession coming?"
Mayor Ron Kim said that he even wondered if this MOU was the time to consider the issues of pay.
"I agreed with you in January when you said this [the 12-hour shift] was a big mistake," Kim said to Montagnino, adding the shift change should have been the sole focus of the negotiation with the union. The salary differentials and other increases are a larger discussion for another time, he said. “I think we tried to do too much in this discussion."
Montagnino admitted the numbers looked large but part of the budget increase would be funded by bringing back the traffic division in the police department. The fines generated, generally on commercial traffic, in previous years reached about $300,000. Other savings would be found through better retention and less attrition in the department.
The commissioners were not persuaded and said they needed to see more comparative analysis, data that shows what other departments in the area are doing.
Throwing money at the problem of retention might not be the best answer, the mayor said, and doing so now might prove disastrous in the next couple of years.
"There is some uncertainty in the economy," he said. "I'm very hesitant to do this...on the out years."
Montagnino said in a subsequent interview that he hoped to have all the data to the council by their next meeting on July 5, and that they could have the MOU ratified then so that the new schedules would roll out this summer.