Waaayyy back in June, I received an anonymous tip that members of the DPW Flower Crew were accumulating massive amounts of overtime. I proceeded to file Freedom of Information Law requests to acquire the time cards for the flower crew for the months of May and June. The city dragged its feet on filling my request, but I finally recieved the documents last week.

It turned out that during the week of June 8, five DPW employees acrued between 5 and 17.5 hours over time. This did seem suspicious, until I realized what was going on that week.

Saturday June 14, the last day in the pay period for that week, was the city's Flag Day Parade, wich closed Broadway for several hours. DPW crews were invovled in set up and clean up after the event, so the overtime was warranted.

In addition, Commissioner of Public Works Skip Scirocco told me that during the same period in 2007 DPW employeed 17 people to do work now handled by six. So, while the overtime during that week was high, chances are there was was an overall savings accumulated by not having the 11 extra employees working.

There was other overtime accumulated in late spring/early summer, but not more than a few hours here and there, certainly in line with the need to water the flowers that appear to be an important point of pride to Saratogians.

So that is the long-awaited answer.