Benjamin Kabak

The latest from The Post on the MTA’s overtime payouts sure sounds familiar. As MTA CEO and Chairman Jay Walder is exploring ways to reduce overtime, the MTA, say Tom Namako and James Fanelli, is doling out dollars left and right. It’s an outrage! Or is it?

First, the story:

As the MTA was announcing plans in 2009 to eliminate two subway lines and 33 bus routes, thousands of employees — from agency presidents to train mechanics — were pocketing millions in overtime and other perks, The Post has learned.

Hogging a stunning slice of the overtime were Long Island Rail Road employees, who benefit from arcane union work rules that allow everyday engineers and grease monkeys to rake in hundreds of thousands of dollars above their salaries while barely lifting a wrench. Railroad employees account for more than half of the top 100 overtime earners in 2009, records show.

Monica Hunter, a supervisor for the LIRR, was the highest overtime earner, pulling in a staggering $155,000 on top of her $79,000 salary last year. Track foreman Vincent Mazzola wasn’t far behind, scoring $148,000 on top of his $82,000 salary. Work rules — some more than a century old — allow employees to game the system. For example, when crew members are switched from one train to the next, they are contractually given another day’s full pay.

The MTA Inspector General, says The Post, is currently conducting a review of these pesky LIRR work rules from another era, but for The Post, that investigation and analysis seems nearly beside the point. Look at how wasteful the MTA is!

But let’s step back from the snarky exclamation points and the initial outrage to ask another question: Did these two reporters actually ask the MTA how much it would cost to fill the vacant shifts without overtime? How much more would the MTA be paying in salary and, more importantly, benefits and pension plans if the authority hired a new worker for every 40 hours of overtime per week? That would, I think, be a vital piece of information to have before slamming the MTA for doling out the overtime. It is possible for overtime to be a money-saver.

When a state comptroller report called for tighter overtime regulations, frequent SAS commenter Niccolo Machiavelli left a very detailed comment with some overtime math. Based upon the numbers, the average MTA worker puts in 4.5 hours of overtime a week, a figure well within range of the national average. While it’s easy to highlight the outliers, the MTA’s overtime isn’t nearly as problematic as it seems.

It makes sense, of course, for the authority to modernize its overtime rules. LIRR employees, for example, shouldn’t draw overtime just because they have to go work on another train to fill out their shift. But it pays to look a little deeper at the problem before proclaiming it to be one.

For those in the upper reaches of the MTA, the key theme of the year is “making every dollar counts.” On the surface, this is seemingly an obvious state of affairs. After all, we don’t want situations in which dollars don’t count or are being flushed away.

But a close examination of the MTA’s recent approaches reveals exactly how the authority is making every dollar, even as market forces conspire against them. For example, the newly re-proposed capital campaign has cut down on $2 billion of proposed expenditures by eliminating those projects that won’t eventually save operating costs and streamlining others. If the authority had original plans to replace old infrastructure simply because of age and not because a modern building would lead to operating cost savings, those plans were scraped.

On Friday, as part of this rearranging of MTA priorities, New York City Transit announced a long-rumored < a href="http://mta.info/news/stories/?story=54">restructuring of the subway division. For all intents and purposes, former Transit president Howard Roberts’ line manager program has been eliminated, and the various functions that were to be centralized under the line managers are being redistributed across various working groups that will focus solely on a specific area or two.

Overall, the five Group General Managers are being scaled down to three, and those three will oversee what Transit is calling the IRT, BMT and IND divisions, maintaining a naming structure that owes its origins to the history of the New York City subways. The line GMs have been cut down from 17 to 12, and those remaining in place will be responsible for customer service and routine station maintenance. Heavy maintenance and car equipment responsibilities will rest with those who are better qualified for those jobs.

“The big change here is centralizing heavy maintenance and giving those responsibilities to the folks who are best equipped to deal with them. But aside from that, the Department of Subways is identifying a leadership team with the capability, know-how and experience to position us to build upon our successes,” Transit President Thomas F. Prendergast said. “This team will stay focused on our customers’ needs and look for every opportunity to improve upon the safe and positive travel experience we already provide.”

It is unclear how much money this restructuring will save the MTA, but at least seven management-level positions are being eliminated via this restructuring. The big question mark, though, remains around the dollars. In an article that should surprise no one, The Post discovered that the MTA’s payroll obligations increased by $70 million in 2009. While The Post highlights some management-level employees who enjoyed significant salary increases, the paper also discusses how the TWU raises imposed significantly higher salary costs on the MTA as well. Across the board, the MTA cannot stop paying higher salaries.

We know that the MTA is cutting administrative pay and positions this year, and last week, the authority announced another round of station agent layoffs. On both sides of the aisle though, the MTA cannot keep salaries under control, and Andrew Albert, a non-voting member of the MTA board, pointed his finger at both sides. “I just don’t know how there is an end to this never-ending [wage] escalation,” he said.

There probably isn’t an end to that problem, and thus, the pink slips will keep on coming. The MTA can reorganize its divisions until fewer people are left. It can eliminate workers until station staffing levels are stretched too thin. But until we see anyone willing to fight for a wage freeze, albeit a temporary one, the expenditures may just outpace the cost-cutting measures.