DOH managers must put stop to excessive OT

Anyone with business acumen knows that keeping overtime to a minimum is a hallmark of good management. And excessive OT is usually a sign of, well, bad management.

So learning that eight state workers, who are responsible for the accounting and loan processing end of the Clean Water State Revolving Fund and the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund, collected $471,304 in overtime since fiscal year 2007, it’s difficult to fathom how that was allowed to happen, year in and year out. Those workers earned time and a half on the taxpayers’ dime.

The drinking-water fund, managed under the state Department of Health, has been heavily scrutinized in recent months. The Environmental Protection Agency has threatened to take back federal funds that are supposed to be loaned out to counties to improve the state’s aging drinking water infrastructure. The fund was not drawing down quickly enough. The EPA said that as of the end of 2014, $100 million in federal and state funds sat unspent.

Much of the overtime coincides with major seasonal work from July to December that creates a surge of activity due to availability of fiscal yearend data, said Janice Okubo, Health Department spokeswoman. The workload of the business loan officers and accountants includes preparing numerous state and federal annual reports, financial statements and audits, she said.

Each year, Okubo said, the requirements and deadlines related to the two revolving funds increase in volume and complexity, which requires additional work. Among the more alarming requests for OT came in 2009, when a wastewater branch chief requested for two loan officers and an accountant to work 936 hours of overtime over the course of three months at a cost of $76,230.

Keith Kawaoka, the DOH deputy director of environmental health who inherited the OT-plagued programs this year, said he can only look forward from this point. In doing so, there must be a strong commitment among the Health Department’s new leaders to fix a broken system.

Kawaoka assured there are several improvements on the horizon, including a new $450,000 financial and project tracking system, which will help ease the workload and eventually reduce overtime once it is fully implemented.

When the department came under fire recently for not spending the federal funds fast enough, it turned to the Lean Kaizen management improvement process to help find efficiencies in lending out the 20-year low-interest loans to the counties for capital improvement projects. The Lean Kaizen process is a methodology often used in the private sector.

Already, the program has identified steps it can eliminate in order to streamline processes. Among them, saving one to two weeks of work to prepare memos for the division chief, Kawaoka said. While cutting unnecessary tasks is a positive step, it ultimately requires more keen oversight, which seems to have been lacking for several years.

"I can understand the public’s viewpoint … another indication of government wasting money," Kawaoka said. "From what we see, there is no abuse. It’s a management thing where we need to do a better job."

Taxpayers will be watching intently, to see that the OT payments go down, while the pace of water-system improvements moves up.