TOWN OF TONAWANDA
$625,000 settles police overtime lawsuit
By Harold McNeil
NEWS STAFF REPORTER
Updated: 05/06/08 6:46 AM
The Tonawanda Town Board on Monday agreed to pay a settlement of $625,000 in a labor lawsuit filed by 120 town police officers who alleged they had been cheated out of overtime between 2003 and 2005.
The measure was approved by all four board members, with Supervisor Anthony F. Caruana abstaining from casting a vote.
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of current and former town police officers who sought to collect unpaid overtime that they claim the town owes them and to remedy what they allege were other violations of the federal Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.
“It’s a very complicated piece of legislation, and it requires overtime to be paid in certain circumstances,” said Town Attorney Daniel T. Caravello after Monday’s Town Board meeting.
“It is particularly difficult to ensure compliance [of the law], from an employer’s standpoint, when you have nontraditional shifts that are worked, particularly in police departments,” Caravello added.
He said similar claims have been brought throughout the country, but the town, Caravello added, actually took great effort to try to comply with the Fair Labor Standards Act. Those efforts included participating in meetings with U. S. Department of Labor officials, as well as attending several sessions with the town police officers and a court mediator, he said.
Caravello said those meetings resulted in a recommendation that a settlement of the case was in the best interests of both the town and the police officers who brought the lawsuit.
A third of the settlement amount will go to cover the cost of attorney fees.
“The town has no insurance for this type of thing, so it’s the Town of Tonawanda that pays it,” Caravello said. “The town is self-insured. But it is a claim covering several years and, as part of the settlement, steps have been taken to make sure that there can be no claims of this nature going forward.”
Caravello said he was confident the town could have won the lawsuit if it had gone to court.
“If the case had been taken to court, we felt like we had a pretty good defense on some of the claims, but 120 officers is a lot of individuals over a three-year period. The numbers add up fairly quickly, even though in some cases, the alleged overtime that wasn’t paid was minimal,” he said.
