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Dade City Offers To Trade Burial Plots For Overtime Pay

Tribune file photo by BOB WESTENHOUSER

City staff will be able to trade in some of their accumulated overtime for a reservation in the historical Dade City Cemetery.

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By CHRISTIAN M. WADE | The Tampa Tribune

Published: May 28, 2008

DADE CITY - Faced with a mountain of overtime debt, officials in this east Pasco County municipality have come up with a novel approach to compensate workers: offering them plots in the city's cemetery.

For a limited time, city staff will be able to trade in some of their accumulated overtime for a reservation in the historical Dade City Cemetery off Martin Luther King Boulevard.

The new policy, which began with a request from a city employee to trade her overtime for a plot in the burial ground, was given a nod by the city commission Tuesday night.

Under the proposal, only city workers with a substantial amount of banked overtime will be eligible to participate in the one-time offer, which expires in 60 days.

The average cost of a plot in the municipal cemetery runs between $300 and $400.

Overtime obligations weigh heavily on the city's dwindling general fund, the result of years of allowing wage-earning employees to bank their overtime pay.

In March, the commission took steps to contain the costs by voting to do away with the compensatory time system; preventing workers from storing hours worth tens of thousands of dollars in owed pay when they left.

As of September, the city had an unfunded liability of about $756,000 in accumulated sick leave, vacation and compensation time.

In the past, hourly employees could store comp time rather than be paid overtime. The maximum amount of comp time that could be stored was 240 hours, the equivalent of six weeks of pay.

City officials pointed out at Tuesday's meeting that a majority of the city's more-than-70 employees do not have massive amounts of comp time to use and that salaried employees are exempt from the new policy.

Reporter Christian M. Wade can be reached at (727) 815-1082 or cwade@tampatrib.com.

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