Emergency dispatchers using federal leave to get time off

Oct. 20--Nearly half of Chicago's 911 dispatchers are off work on federal medical leave at any given time, the city's Emergency Management commissioner said Wednesday, driving up overtime costs for an agency that must ensure that enough people are working to handle calls for emergency assistance.

Alicia Tate-Nadeau told aldermen during the Office of Emergency Management and Communication's 2017 budget hearing that she has hired dozens of additional people to work as dispatchers, in an effort to lower overtime costs. But large numbers of dispatchers are out daily via the Family and Medical Leave Act, which allows workers up to 12 weeks off unpaid each year for a variety of family or medical reasons.

"In intermittent FMLA, we have approximately 44 people every single day that call off," Tate-Nadeau said. "That's about 49 percent of all of the 911 operators that we have, are on some time of intermittent FMLA. Clearly this number is much larger than it should be."

"The challenge of intermittent FMLA is that they can call that very day and say we are not going to be here," she told aldermen. "So whenever I hire folks back for overtime, I'm hiring them back at a minimum of time and a half to two times the salary."

After her testimony was over, Tate-Nadeau ignored a reporter's questions about whether dispatchers were using FMLA so much because OEMC officials were refusing to grant them regular days off because of staffing shortages.

Aldermen also voiced concerns to Tate-Nadeau about city crossing guards being moved into her department from the Police Department. The crossing guards have said they are worried that they would have less authority if they aren't affiliated with the Police Department.

Ald. Patrick Daley Thompson, 11th, said crossing guards prefer police-type uniforms because people tend to respect them more and listen to their orders. "They look like police, they're perceived to be police and, in some places where they work, that's their only advantage," Thompson said.

Also during day three of hearings Wednesday on Mayor Rahm Emanuel's proposed 2017 spending plan, aldermen renewed their call for the city to hire more minorities, particularly in light of the police hiring surge Emanuel has promised in a bid to deal with the city's violent crime.

It's a common theme at city budget hearings each autumn, as members of the City Council get a chance to publicly hold city officials responsible for the number of African-Americans and Hispanics who have been hired in various departments.

When Human Resources Commissioner Soo Choi appeared Wednesday morning, talk quickly turned to making sure the 970 officers Emanuel says will be hired in the next two years are diverse.

"This will probably be the largest point of hiring the city will see, especially the Police Department, for the next umpteen years, and we want to make sure that class, those classes of officers are diverse, reflect the city's diversity. And we need to know what (the Human Resources Department) is doing to make that a reality. Not planning, but what are you doing to make that reality," said Budget Vice Chairman Ald. Jason Ervin.

Choi told aldermen the department will continue outreach to different organizations around the city to solicit diverse candidates. Of the current police applicant list of 8,921, about 71 percent identified as male and 28 percent as female, and about 26 percent as white, 23 percent as black, 42 percent as Hispanic and 3 percent as Asian, Choi said. The city could hire as many as 1,100 new police officers in 2017 to cover Emanuel's new hires, fill existing vacancies and fill new vacancies from retirements and promotions, she said.

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