Montgomery County Executive Ike Leggett wants to impose an ambulance fee on county residents identical to the one voters rejected at the polls less than two years ago. Leggett claims emergency services will suffer without the added levy, which would charge residents’ insurance companies between $300 and $800 for the same ambulance ride now covered by their tax dollars. But Councilman Phil Andrews, D-Gaithersburg, one of four County Council members who voted against the ambulance fee the first time around, saw right through Leggett’s ploy, calling it “an end-run around the voters and the council.”
If Leggett needs more money for emergency services, he should start by clamping down on the outrageous amount of overtime currently paid to employees in Fire and Rescue, Police, Corrections and Transportation Departments. As The Examiner’s Rachel Baye reported in Sunday’s cover story, these four departments alone paid $36.5 million in overtime last year, exceeding their budgeted amount by nearly one-third. In the first half of the current fiscal year, they’ve already spent $20.7 million, or 73 percent of the year’s overtime budget.
Baye reports that dozens of unionized county employees have been cashing five-figure OT checks that came close to their total annual salary. Fourteen of the top 15 overtime earners took home more than $200,000 in compensation in 2011, in addition to their gold-plated health and pension benefits. One correctional officer somehow racked up 2,821.5 hours of overtime. This is almost physically impossible — the equivalent of working two-and-a-half years’ worth of hours in a single year.
Personnel costs — including compensation for 1,251 full-time employees — make up 83 percent of the Fire and Rescue Service’s $180 million operating budget. Leggett recommends increasing that budget to $196.6 million next year. According to the county’s own statistics, nearly two-thirds of the 120,000 emergency responses last year were answering calls for medical assistance. Leggett wants county residents to pay hundreds of dollars extra for a ride to the hospital so he can raise Fire and Rescue’s budget 9.2 percent to cover all that overtime.
Montgomery County has a dodgy recent history with employees gaming the system. In 2009, the county’s Police Department was rocked by a tuition reimbursement scam. County government has also investigated abusive disability claims by police and firefighters. The Inspector General found that three of every five police who retired between 2004 and 2008 were awarded lifetime disability pensions, and the number of firefighters applying for the tax-free benefit suddenly surged in 2010, The Examiner’s Brian Hughes reported that August. In that context, and given the outrageous overtime payments, County Council members and taxpayers have every reason to be skeptical of Leggett’s claim that they cannot make ends meet without charging for ambulance rides.
