TYC to review overtime pay for guards

 The Texas Youth Commission will temporarily halt overtime payments for correctional officers while it reviews how the agency spent more than half of its annual overtime budget in September, officials said.
The state’s juvenile prison system spent about 55 percent of the $1.3 million that it expected to spend in an entire year.
Dimitria Pope, acting executive director, said all overtime payments will be suspended starting Wednesday “until controls are verified at each facility for ensuring critical needs for the continuing high usage,” according to an internal memo obtained by the Austin American-Statesman.
The system’s 2,200 guards will still be required to work overtime, but their payments will be “banked” for later rather than disbursed at the end of the month.
Pope’s memo said a special team will be assigned to review the overtime issue.
“We have found a system where there is not a great degree of accountability or standardization from one facility to another,” spokesman Jim Hurley said.
He said the review should be completed by the end of November.
Officials said federal labor law allows the state to require correctional officers to work overtime without paying them immediately because the guards’ duties are related to maintaining public safety.
State leaders ordered an overhaul of the Youth Commission this spring to address a scandal stemming from the sexual abuse of inmates and agency mismanagement.
As part of the changes, then-Conservator Jay Kimbrough ordered all overtime to be paid as it was worked with the goal of reducing turnover among the system’s guards that had left some facilities understaffed.
The Statesman reported that commission officials attributed September’s overtime load to new requirements that guards have 300 hours of training, higher inmate populations at some facilities, ongoing problems with turnover and vacancy rates, and increased staff-to-youth ratios required by the Legislature as part of the agency’s overhaul.
In her memo, Pope also blamed “a cumbersome timekeeping system which complicates accurate monitoring and overtime use management.”
House Corrections Committee Chairman Jerry Madden, a Plano Republican who co-chairs a special legislative panel overseeing agency reforms, questioned how commission officials had gone “through that much of their budget, without someone raising a flag, in just 30 days?”
Rep. Scott Hochberg, D-Houston, vice chairman of the House Corrections Committee, questioned the idea to bank overtime payments for guards.
“I have a real hard time with employees being told to work overtime and that they can’t get paid in a timely manner because there is an administrative problem,” he said.