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COUNCILMAN QUESTIONS THE DOLLARS CITY PAID FOR SICK TIME

By Stephen Baxter

The city of San Jose has paid more than $17 million to police, firefighters and other city employees to compensate for their unused sick days since 2005, and one city councilman is questioning whether it was the best use of public money.

Police who retired in 2007 received more than $2.7 million, and firefighters were paid more than $530,000 for their accrued sick time. Some individual retirees received checks for $221,000 and $171,000, according to city documents.

Councilman Pierluigi Oliverio requested the figures in February in a closed session hearing at San Jose City Hall, and released them on a San Jose Inside blog post on March 24.

"These are the types of things that drive people crazy," Oliverio said. "In private industry we don't have this."

Oliverio said he had not decided whether to seek changes in the next round of union negotiations with city employees, and the findings were part of a broader inquiry in to ways to trim the city's five-year, $137 million projected budget deficit. Oliverio said he wanted to "meet and confer" about the matter with police, firefighters and other bargaining units, and any savings could be put used to hire more police or improve parks, libraries or other city services.

Bobby Lopez, president of the San Jose Police Officers' Association, called the idea an "oversimplification" of the issue.

Police should be compensated for unused sick time because supervisors routinely tell officers to work when they are sick, Lopez said. Police come in because they do not have replacements for their patrols.

"What [supervisors] engrain in you is they don't want you to call in sick," Lopez said. "They know if they get sick and stay home, they won't be backfilled. I've gone to work with bronchitis because I've been told that officers won't have a partner."

Lopez added that several hundred police officers have been cut in recent years, and more officers might stay home sick if they knew an officer would replace them on duty.

Unlike police, San Jose firefighters who call in sick typically are replaced by a firefighter who is paid overtime wages. Because firefighters rack up less accrued sick time, the city's annual payouts to firefighters at retirement have been roughly one-fourth to one-third of what police were paid since 2005.

In total, San Jose handed its employees $5.5 million in sick-time payouts in 2007, $4.6 million in 2006 and $6.9 million in 2005, according to city records.

Sick day costs

When many San Jose employees retire, they are compensated for the sick days they did not take. These are the totals from 2005 to 2007.