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March 24 Newsletter: Overtime costs a concern for city

Weather: Scattered rain until mid-afternoon; high of 63.

On this date in 1956, the board of visitors at William & Mary raises tuition at Richmond Professional Institute to $240 for in-state students ($2,857 in today's money). The school became independent of W&M in 1962.

Richmond is paying tens of millions for overtime every year. That’s raising some eyebrows.

City of Richmond employees who worked overtime were paid more than $26 million last year.

Numbers reviewed by The Richmonder showed at least 44 employees earned more than $10,000 in overtime pay in a single month last year.

  • Police and fire workers accounted for the majority of overtime spending.
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A fire department employee was paid 255 hours of overtime in December. On a six-week cycle, that would be 42.5 hours per week of overtime.

City officials have been trying to cut back on the amount of overtime worked since 2017, with limited success. City Auditor Riad Ali said his office is planning to review overtime data to see if the policy meant to cut back is working as intended. Ali said he was “taken aback” by the numbers he’s seen.

Read The Richmonder's full report here.

Richmond police hope a new high-tech lasso can help cut down on use of force

The department purchased 50 BolaWrap 150s, which they said "allow for the safe control of a subject without a use of force."

  • Officers are supposed to shout, “Bola, bola, bola!” before they use it to give their target a warning.

The Richmonder agreed to participate in a demonstration of the BolaWrap and found that while the anchor hooks could pinch if the target struggled against them, the whole experience was more peculiar than painful. Read more here.

Photo by Dave Infante/Church Hill Lookout

Also this weekend

  • Several hundred protestors gathered outside a reenactment of Patrick Henry's "Give me liberty or give me death" speech on its 250th anniversary. The reenactment was attended by Governor Glenn Youngkin and filmmaker Ken Burns.
  • Basketball coach Ryan Odom announced he will leave VCU to coach at the University of Virginia. As a child, Odom worked UVA games as a ballboy while his dad was an assistant coach, but he's most famous for beating the Cavaliers in the NCAA tournament while coaching No. 16-seed UMBC.

In other news

The editor's desk

Saturday night's Richmond Forum presentation featured author Richard Reeves, who has written about how boys are falling behind, both in school and society.

Reeves made clear that gender shouldn't be a zero-sum game, and there are still major strides women and girls need to make, but presented research showing boys are struggling to keep up in America's classrooms. He also called for a mass recruitment effort of male teachers, particularly those from backgrounds that represent a school's student body (something RPS is already working on).

Michael Phillips, founding editor
mphillips@richmonder.org

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