Anchorage police and fire overtime budgets built on 2010 math, OMB says

Anchorage police and fire departments are each running significantly over their approved overtime budgets, and the city's budget office told the Assembly Budget and Finance Committee on Thursday that the math behind those budgets has not been updated in at least four years and may trace to a continuation-budget baseline dating to roughly 2010.

Assembly Member Erin Baldwin Day named the gap for both departments. "Our full-year actuals with police were over $10 million in overtime spend," she said. "The approved overtime budget for this year is $4.9 million." Fire Department actuals ran close to $7 million against an approved budget of roughly $4.3 million.

OMB Director Ona Brouse said the gap reflects two distinct problems: overtime allocations that have not changed in at least four years, and a continuation-budget structure that can carry forward old numbers indefinitely. "We're working from a base budget of about 2010," she said, "and if the 2010 overtime number was never adjusted, then that would be the number we are working with every single year."

Brouse also said OMB's standard practice is to wait roughly three to five years and use rolling averages before changing budget assumptions, so a single-year spike would not automatically trigger a correction.

Two Departments, Different Causes

The two departments face different root causes. For the Fire Department, federal labor law requires the last several hours of each 56-hour firefighter shift to be paid as overtime, and the blended wage used to budget that cost has not kept pace. "The wages have changed dramatically," Brouse said, "and so that blended average, that $50, we think is now— these are numbers we're working on— we think are now closer to $60 an hour, which means that this OT amount would have to be recalibrated even for their regular accepted approved overtime that's in their operating budget."

For the Police Department, vacancies are the driver. "The reason their overtime is so hot is because of their vacancies," Brouse said. "They are missing 70 police officers." She added that for a vacancy-driven department, the relevant question is whether the department is staying within its overall labor allocation, not just whether overtime spending exceeds the overtime line.

A Correction Is Underway

Brouse said this year brought new clarity. "This is, you know, the first year that we have had the rolling confirmation that the overtime allocations are not right," she said. Three years of post-pandemic data now support a correction, and analysis is underway as part of the fiscal year 2027 budget process.