WPRO Newsroom
According to a report from the Ocean State Current in conjunction with the think tank, Rhode Island Center for Freedom and Prosperity, government workers for the Department of Behavioral Healthcare, Development Disabilities and Hospital (BHDDH) and the Department of Corrections were earning hundreds of thousands dollars in overtime in 2010 and 2011.
The report, released in installments, revealed that some nurses at the state-funded Eleanor Slater Hospital – an institution named in the Block Report as a site of potential Medicaid waste and fraud – were making nearly $250,000 annually because of overtime. Another installment showed laundry workers for BHDDH made more than $100,000 a year in 2011. Additionally, a third installment showed massive overtime payouts in the Department of Corrections.
“You could almost say the state is defrauding itself,” Mike Stenhouse, CEO of the Rhode Island Center for Freedom and Prosperity told WPRO’s Buddy Cianci Thursday. He said the data, which they obtained from a third-party watchdog group at Northeastern University, shows state aid being siphoned back to union workers through exorbitant seniority and overtime payouts.
“To earn double your salary, which this one person pretty much did, and assuming time and a half, you’d probably have to work 80 hours a week, every week of the year,” said Stenhouse.
It’s something that Craig Stenning, director of BHDDH, doesn’t deny. Stenning told Cianci Wednesday that he was “shocked” when he saw the salaries of these employees in 2011. He found out that many of them had willingly worked additional second or third shifts 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year.
“I sort of said maybe they need to get a hobby,” he said,
The report from The Current shows that overtime pay skyrocketed in 2010 and 2011, but Stenning said 2012 was a different situation. Stenning called the end of 2010 an “extreme scenario,” where many workers left because of uncertainty with pensions. Rather than replace workers, or hire additional staffers, leadership found it cheaper to dish out overtime to current workers. The results are what Stenhouse called “monstrous” overtime payouts.
But Stenning said the “overtime” figure at listed by The Current also includes things like stipends for taking up additional shifts and seniority pay bumps. He said he expects overtime payments to stay down (like where he said they dropped to in 2012) because of administrative changes that will allow him to more easily hire new staff.
“We’ve expanded the pool of people we could offer overtime to,” he said.
Stenning said the average cost of a bed in a BHDDH hospital is $980 per day, a cost he says is lower than any other community hospital.
