Already facing massive yearly budget deficits, the city of Chicago could face a bill in the hundreds of millions of dollars for police overtime in a long-running case on behalf of 8,500 current and former Chicago Police Department employees.
It’s been nearly 10 years since the case was filed and almost five years since a federal judge ruled in favor of the officers, who argued that the city “willfully violated” labor laws by miscalculating overtime pay they were due over a span of years.
But the two sides are still fighting over how much the city will have to pay.
An expert hired by the officers says the city owes the cops somewhere between $310 million and $450 million, court records show. City Hall’s hired expert says it’s much less — no more than about $195 million.
Even that is far more than the $14 million the city could have settled the case for at the start, Paul Geiger, a former police union attorney who represented the police officers who sued, said after a court hearing Thursday.
Geiger said the figure keeps growing because of interest that’s compounding as the case goes on.
“If you care at all about the finances of the city, you get rid of this lawsuit,” Geiger said. “We’re not here to be unreasonable about this thing, but we’ve also worked for a decade, and the police need to get paid.
“They should have been paid in the first place, and everybody has spent millions upon millions of dollars processing this case for the last 10 years,” Geiger said. “If you are breaking the law, and you know you’re breaking the law, you resolve it. You don’t say, ‘Well, we know we’re breaking the law, but we just don’t want to pay anything.’ ”
Geiger and John Catanzara, president of the Fraternal Order of Police, which represents rank-and-file officers, blasted Mayor Brandon Johnson and his two most recent predecessors, Lori Lightfoot and Rahm Emanuel. Catanzara said the mayors acted in a “disgusting” fashion by allowing the federal civil case to remain unresolved for so long.
“It’s stupid for the city to drag it out,” Catanzara said. “Nobody should have to settle for less than what they earned just because the city didn’t calculate [overtime] right.”
A spokeswoman for the city’s Law Department wouldn’t comment.
An outside lawyer for the city denied accusations from the lawyers for the police employees that the city has been delaying the legal proceedings.
According to court records, the city failed to properly pay officers for a range of overtime programs, including its Violence Reduction Initiative on the South Side and the West Side and the detail guarding then-President Barack Obama’s house on the South Side.
Geiger said the city would have paid far sooner if it were other employees rather than police officers who were owed the overtime checks.
“If this case involved 8,500 Walmart checkers or maybe city teachers or some other individuals other than Chicago police officers — who are, sadly, often treated like third-class citizens — it would have been resolved,” Geiger said. “But this is Chicago, and, for some reason, they just want to kick the can and not pay the police.”
The city of Chicago’s latest bond disclosures don’t mention the case among litigation that could affect the city’s finances.
Joe Ferguson, president of the Civic Federation, said the city has let the police overtime case and other labor disputes linger for too long, making it impossible to get a handle on City Hall’s financial situation.
“We really ought to bottom-line these things so we can begin to move forward and avoid carrying the legacy of the past into the future forever,” said Ferguson, a former City Hall inspector general.