The highest-paid city of Duluth employee is not the mayor, the chief administrative officer or the city attorney. He’s a city utility operations lead worker whose job responsibilities include repairing water line breaks and digging ditches.

A combination of contract rules and a dilapidated city infrastructure pushed Daniel Jazdzewski’s salary in 2009 to almost $124,000.

Why? More than a third of his salary came from working almost 1,500 hours of overtime.

That overtime alone was more than the salaries of nearly 300 other city workers, according to data requested and analyzed by the News Tribune and provided by the city of Duluth.

But Jazdzewski wasn’t the only employee to work massive amounts of overtime last year. The 25 city employees who earned the most overtime in 2009 each worked at least

500 extra hours, and 23 of those workers were from the city’s Public Works Department, while the other two were police officers.

Eleven of those public works employees’ pay was higher than Mayor Don Ness’ $83,856 salary.

Salary data from St. Paul and Minneapolis showed that no public works employees in either city worked 1,000 hours or more in overtime.

The city of Superior’s total spending in 2009 on public works overtime was just over $23,000.

“I am thoroughly alarmed at what I see,” City Councilor Jim Stauber said after reviewing the data. “While thousands in our city and region are under-employed or have lost their job, and still others are at reduced pay and reduced hours, it seems unreasonable that so many city employees are allowed to continue to do this.

“Who’s minding the store?” he asked.

Contract forces overtime

City utility operations manager Steve Lipinski said he doesn’t believe the overtime pay is abnormal. The cost is necessary, he said, because of the high number of water main breaks, valve repairs and gas service repairs his crews go out on.

In 2009 the city responded to 774 calls for such repairs, according to city data, including 162 emergency repairs. About 350 of those jobs required use of overtime. Without after-hours work when a main breaks, Lipinski said, people would be without water.

“We’re trying to protect the customers,” he said, “and respond as rapidly as possible.”

But the contract language doesn’t help the city control personnel costs.

Under the city’s contract with the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 66, public works employees earn overtime pay, at time and a half, while on call — whether they are called to work or not.

On-call work is arranged differently for each of three public works divisions. Utility operations, which gets the most overtime pay, repairs water and gas line breaks.

Workers take turns being on call for an entire week, earning regular pay for their normal 40-hour schedule and time-and-a-half for the other 32 hours they’re on call — a total of 88 hours of regular pay in a week. If they’re called out to work, they earn additional time-and-a-half pay for the time they work — and for the time it takes them to get to the job site. Some employees live as far away as Cloquet, Two Harbors and Poplar.

Another clause in the contract that inflates overtime: If a crew is on a job that will extend past the 4 p.m. shift and requires overtime, the city must call and offer the job to senior staff first before keeping the crew that’s already on site.

“If a senior worker is out there, they generally have more experience and can get the job done more efficiently,” Lipinski said. “And there is a contract that we have to follow.”

It’s all created a system that has fed 54 percent of the city’s overtime spending to the Public Works Department in 2009, compared to 24 percent for police and 12 percent for fire.

“If a lay person knew exactly what was in [Duluth] contracts and how our tax dollars were being spent, they would be flabbergasted,” said City Councilor Todd Fedora. “You keep going back to the people of Duluth, taking money from them while they’re struggling to make ends meet, while we’re paying folks enormous amounts of money to carry a pager. It’s mind-boggling.”

‘They need me to work’

Many current and former employees who have earned the overtime deny just “carrying a pager.”

“The majority of the time, I’m working on repairing the system,” Jazdzewski said. “We can’t shut our work down at 4 in the afternoon and come back at 7:30 in the morning.”

The time spent to repair water line or valve breaks can take several hours or days, said Jazdzewski, who lives in Duluth. Crews can get anywhere from three to four calls a day, Jazdzewski said, especially in the winter.

Harvey Maas, a utility operations lead worker, earned $43,795 for just more than 1,000 hours of overtime in 2009 on top of his gross salary of about $68,000.

“It all boils down to, they need me to work, and I’m willing to work,” Maas said.

Mike Switzer, a retired utility operations lead worker, acknowledged that there were seven days in a row when he’d be on standby and wouldn’t be called out to a single incident, but he said that was the exception.

“Yes, I do sleep during that time,” he said. “But if I’m on duty, I’ve got to get paid for it. I’m not going to do it for free. I don’t think there are too many people out there that would.”

He said the only way he sees to reduce overtime costs would be to hire more employees and move toward shifts like those in street maintenance, where overtime costs are a fraction of utility operations’.

Though Ness has hinted at his disapproval of the standby rules, he declined to comment for this story, citing the recent contract dispute between the administration and AFSCME.

“We need to focus on the issues that we have on the table,” he said. “I don’t want to introduce new points of conflict on these other issues where we clearly have disagreement.”

City Chief Administrative Officer David Montgomery said the 2010 contract that AFSCME members will soon vote on doesn’t include a change in standby rules.

He declined to speak further on the issue but indicated it might be on the table during the next round of negotiations.

“The administration is concerned with all costs and what we can do to bring those costs into alignment with our revenue,” he said. “We’ll be looking very strongly at what we can do in areas of where our cost structure needs to be, and where it can be adjusted.”

If the administration goes after that language, AFSCME negotiating chairman Jim Dreier said the union will fight it.

“I’m sure we’re going to stand solid on it,” he said. “It’s an issue of safety. … I don’t think the people at City Hall realize the seriousness of the utility we have.”