NY Port Authority Police Make Over $300,000 A Year Thanks To "Overtime Bonanza"

Three years after New York State issued a scathing report criticizing what it characterized as excessive overtime at the Port Authority, 131 of the agency’s employees worked so much overtime in the first nine months of this year that they already more than doubled their annual base salaries.

Thirteen agency police officers received more in salary, overtime and other payments in that period than did Executive Director Patrick Foye, whose annual salary is $289,000.

Most of the top overtime earners are police officers, including one who has been averaging an estimated 100 hours of work a week this year, including 60 hours of overtime. That is the equivalent of working more than 14 hours a day, seven days a week. The top 10 overtime earners are averaging an estimated 46 extra hours each week, a workload that experts say raises questions about efficiency and public safety, and is quite high even in a profession where significant overtime is routine.

[....] This year’s top overtime earner has been Officer Morris Cofield, who has a base salary of $90,000 but was paid $262,620 through September, almost $40,000 more than Foye got in the same period. His $172,579 in overtime earnings equal an estimated 59 extra hours of work a week.

Last year, Andrew Kurpat, another officer with a base $90,000 salary, was the agency’s top-paid employee, with $330,856 of earnings, bolstered by $214,643 of overtime and other additional pay. He worked an estimated 56 overtime hours a week for the year. He was one of 11 officers to earn more than Foye’s annual salary in 2013, and one of eight to receive more than $300,000.

Kleptocracy, alternatively cleptocracy or kleptarchy, is a form of political and government corruption where the government exists to increase the personal wealth and political power of its officials and the ruling class at the expense of the wider population, often with pretense of honest service.