MTA chairman Pat Foye on Wednesday vowed to crack down on “excessive overtime payments” across the agency — following revelations that workers raked in hundreds of thousands in overtime pay last year by logging a staggering number of extra hours.
Foye said he’s giving the presidents of the Long Island Rail Road, Metro-North Railroad and New York City Transit 60 days to comb through their last 12 months of overtime claims and payments “to ensure all were earned and appropriate.”
He will also ask the MTA Inspector General’s office to complete its own review of overtime payouts “to ensure that they were appropriately planned for, scheduled, signed off upon, and that the claimed hours were in fact worked.”
And over the next 30 days, the agency will review “all time and attendance verification systems at each of our facilities,” Foye said.
All of the findings will be reported to the MTA board and made public, he added.
As The Post has documented over the past week, overtime spending surged by more than $100 million to $1.3 billion across the entire MTA last year — and went especially off-the-rails at the LIRR, where one worker claimed $344,147 in overtime, according to data from the Empire Center.
Another LIRR track worker more than quadrupled his $55,000 salary by working a seemingly impossible number of hours.
Marco Pazmino raked in $256,177 in overtime for 2018 by logging a jaw-dropping 4,157 extra hours, according to the agency.
On top of the 1,688 hours Pazmino worked at his regular $35-an-hour rate, that works out to an average of 22.4 hours of work a day from Monday to Friday — or 16 hours a day, 365 days in the year.
“The recent reports on excessive overtime payments throughout our system are extremely concerning,” said Foye in a release.
“Some overtime is to be expected at any public transit agency, in order to keep up with critical repairs and maintenance … But the accumulation of so many hours of overtime raises serious questions, including potential safety issues such as exhaustion.”
© 2019 New York Post
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