Zoo Animals Need to Eat — Even on Furlough Fridays
The giraffes, elephants, monkeys and other animals at the Honolulu Zoo do not observe Furlough Fridays.
As a result, neither do many of their caretakers, who have to feed and otherwise tend to zoo-denizens each day of the week. That’s one reason why overtime pay at the Department of Enterprise Services jumped 49 percent in the first six months of 2010 compared to the year before, according to department director Sid Quintal.
After weeks of refusing to talk about how his department handles overtime, Quintal agreed to sit down with Civil Beat Tuesday morning and discuss overtime paid to zoo staffers. Since April, we’ve asked Quintal to explain the spike in overtime pay in his department.
Enterprise Services manages the Honolulu Zoo, city golf courses and major entertainment venues like the Neal S. Blaisdell Center. But Quintal would only talk about overtime paid to zoo staffers, saying discussion of other aspects of his department would “get things distorted.”
Do zoo staffers account for the most overtime in his department? Quintal said no. But he declined to say which group does rack up the most overtime.
Zoo staffers, however, are responsible for most of the department’s overtime costs on furlough days, he says. (Civil Beat’s initial request for an interview stemmed from a series of stories about overtime pay on furlough days.)
“We’re talking about just the zoo,” Quintal said. “At the golf course, they don’t have that problem. Our administrative facilities, they don’t have that problem. But when it comes to the zoo staff, it was a challenge because it is a seven-day-a-week operation. When we have events at the Blaisdell, it’s not an issue. The whole thing boiled down to one group of employees at the zoo.”
In a six-month period between July 2010 and December 2010, Enterprise Services paid its employees $389,139 in overtime pay. Of that pay, 7 percent — or $29,572 — of it was for work done on Furlough Fridays.
“Seven days a week, with the animals there, they have to be fed,” Quintal said. “You’ve got visitors coming in every morning. If you don’t have people there, then we get boo-booed for not doing our job. That’s what’s really critical. We are required.”
Quintal says he has a general sense of overtime use in his department. He and another Enterprise Services administrator have said it would require “extensive” research to review how much individuals in the department earn in overtime. (Read more about Civil Beat’s attempts to review those records.)
The department told Civil Beat it would cost more than $600 to provide public records detailing overtime pay to individuals over a three-year period. But not having such information at his fingertips is not a concern, Quintal says, because his priority is the “overall performance of the department.”
“If there were irregularities that come up, administrative services officer would say, ‘I think we need to look at this,'” Quintal says. “I’m kept apprised of that. There’s an element of trust here. As a director, I hold my division chiefs to the highest standard to make sure that we’re following the guidelines of the labor agreement and also the guidelines of what the administration wants.”
Honolulu Managing Director Doug Chin has said it would be ideal if the overtime information were more readily available. Quintal acknowledges the system by which his department keeps records is antiquated.
“If budgets were such that it wasn’t a monetary problem, I think a lot of these upgrades would have occurred long ago,” Quintal said. “When you come to work in government, you have to realize that there’s a different drumbeat. When you look at a group of 10,000 people, yes, it’s very important to get these records going. The mayor’s running in the same direction. I think when he came into office, he wanted to create more transparency. This is part of that process.”
Former Mayor Mufi Hannemann implemented a multimillion upgrade to city records-keeping that is still being rolled out. A spokesman for Honolulu Mayor Peter Carlisle was unable to say whether the new system will make more information — like how much individuals earn in overtime pay — readily retrievable throughout city departments.
