The City Council spoke of a stillness. A demand for zero expenditure, an immediate freezing of the overtime clock to staunch the flowing red of the municipal shortfall. They sought economy of scale, a pause in the tallying of hours charged against a failing city account.
But Anne Kirkpatrick, the Superintendent, she saw only the depleted ranks.
She saw the thin blue line stretched beyond its reasonable limit. To scale back, she warned, was to risk the officers already working shifts beyond common endurance. A depleted force leaned heavy on those extra hours. The refusal was absolute. Safety would not be the tax levied upon this financial distress.
The declared sum was phantom.
Fifty-seven thousand, five hundred dollars, marked for all the extra clocking in the annual budget. Yet the actual necessary sum was fifty-six million, a shortfall accounting for the majority of that figure. A thousandfold error. The revision never arrived. It was simple omission writ large on the books.
They chased the true cost of existence on the bayou.
Unpredictable things. The New Year’s incident, an event deemed a terrorist attack, pulled $1.5 million from the fund. And the rare cold, the January snowstorm, that unique inconvenience demanded $1.2 million in emergency deployment. These specific burdens of being a city, including the weight of Mardi Gras, had already driven the municipal overtime costs to nearly $13 million this year alone.
Firefighters and police looked to their coming paychecks. They feared the sudden absence of what was owed.
In response to the City Council's call for a pause on all overtime amid a major cash crunch, New Orleans Police Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick ...More takeaways: Visit website
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