SAN ANTONIO – The Bexar County Commissioners Court is preparing to vote Friday whether to authorize 15,198 hours of overtime for Bexar County Jail detention officers in the first quarter of 2017, before a single time card is punched.
Sheriff-elect Javier Salazar, who takes office Jan. 1, said he and his team requested the authorization. The jail is not staffed at mandatory levels, he said, so officers have to work more hours to make up for it. Detention officers are currently scheduled an extra shift every week, and some volunteer for more.
It's his department starting next month, though, and Salazar said his transition team started making phone calls.
"We wanted to know there was a solution to it before I took office, and so sure enough they're working with me, and that's one less thing to worry about come January 1st," he said.
Salazar said the long-term fix, though, is to fill empty positions by retaining officers and aggressively recruiting more so there's less mandatory overtime.
Current Sheriff Susan Pamerlau said in a phone interview, based on the current jail population and number of open housing units in the jail, the Sheriff's Office is only two officers shy of the required number.
Pamerlau said while officers are scheduled for mandatory overtime, they may not end up working it if they aren't required when the time arrives. She said the time is scheduled so officers can block it off.
The sheriff wrote in a Dec. 12 memo to detention staff that the jail had seen a higher inmate population due to issues like, more felony arrests and court delays due to body camera issues. She said those issues led to her using more mandatory overtime than normal.
“Encouraging is the fact that 40-50 percent of all the mandatory overtime is being worked by volunteers,” she wrote, before adding that overtime requirements were down over the past few days.
Juan Contreras, the president of the Deputy Sheriff's Association of Bexar County, whose union backed Salazar in the sheriff's race, said the overtime problem has existed for several years and causes officers stress.
"Knowing you have to stay and that's time away from your family aside from your 40 hours," he said, "that becomes a very stressful issue for people."
Mandatory overtime won't ever end completely, Salazar said, but he wants to manage it as best he can. Until that time, Salazar said he and his command staff will be working mandatory overtime shifts every week as well.
"It's always been my philosophy that I'm not going to ask my troops to do something that I'm not willing to do myself," he said.