Working under one of the most generous state leave policies in the nation - and the country's harshest furlough program - California government employees have built up the equivalent of $2.75 billion of paid time off.
Data analyzed by The Bee show that state workers had 75.5 million hours on the books as of May 28. The time was spread across 17 types of leave employees can cash out when they quit or retire. That's equal to nearly 11 weeks of paid time off owed each of the 176,000 state workers whose leave data are tracked by the state Controller's Office. Average cash value: $15,655 per person.
"We expect much of this time will be used for its intended purpose," said Lynelle Jolley, spokeswoman for the state's Department of Personnel Administration. "We don't want employees hoarding their leave time like it's some sort of retirement benefit."
Prior to The Bee's request, the state had never calculated the aggregate value of employee leave or how many hours the state owes its workers.
Instead, every year each department estimates how many workers it will lose, and what it will cost to cash out their leave. They budget that cost, and in this era of massive state deficits, that's a large pot of money that can't be spent on services. Even worse, if they underestimate, they have to cut services, staffing and other budgeted items to meet those unanticipated obligations.
The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, with about 60,000 staff who run the state's prison and parole systems, accounted for more than a third of the leave liability. The department averaged 450 banked hours per person with a total tab of slightly more than $1 billion.
The state Transportation Department ranked second, with $353.5 million worth of leave on the books. The California Highway Patrol registered the highest per-person average among large departments, 725 hours, and the third-highest liability, $313.8 million. The figure includes Highway Patrol officers, whose contract allows them to bank up to 816 hours of leave.
The tiny Seismic Safety Commission's five employees averaged about 1,000 hours of banked leave time worth more than $52,000 per person, the most of any state body tracked by the controller. Spokeswoman Devon Berrier attributed that to the long state tenure of most of the staff and the demands of the job.
For example, she said, commission Executive Director Dick McCarthy tried to take vacation last week. Then an earthquake rattled Southern California, and he was back on the job after one day.
Generous benefits
A recent survey of 21 state leave policies by the National Association of State Personnel Executives revealed that California's is more generous than any of of them.
New York, for example, sets a 300-hour maximum on leave. Employees can exceed the limit but must draw down the extra hours by certain dates or lose the excess time.
Colorado gradually increases its leave cap during a worker's tenure, with the most senior employees maxing out at 336 hours. That's also the cutoff for leave that departing employees can cash out.
North Carolina doesn't let state workers cash out more than 240 hours of accumulated leave.
But comparing California's leave policies and other forms of employee compensation with other states' is difficult, said Michael Shires, a Pepperdine University expert on the state's budget.
"These things are always complicated by the cost of living, which is huge in California," Shires said. "If you look at wages and benefits here compared with other states', we tend to be near the top."
California caps leave at 640 hours. Some types of time off - hours put into state workers' time banks to settle lawsuits, for example - don't count toward that limit. The state's leave boundaries are loosely enforced. Some departments ask employees to make plans to draw down their time if it becomes excessive, but the practice isn't uniformly applied.
"Employees routinely blow through those caps - particularly at the higher pay levels and particularly among managers and executives," said Dave Gilb, the former director of the Department of Personnel Administration.
California Watch, a nonprofit investigative journalism group, earlier this year reported that 19 percent of exempt state employees - typically managers - were over the state's leave limit in 2009. That was up just one percentage point from a year earlier.
A handful of state workers have quit or retired with leave payouts in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. In a recent report published by The Bee, California Watch found that 25 state workers in 2007 and 2008 received leave payout checks of $203,000 or more. One prison employee left with more than $800,000.
The state in 2005 put tighter leave controls on its agenda for labor talks, Gilb said. Negotiators set the issue aside when the unions made other concessions and effectively argued the matter wasn't a rank-and-file problem. Managers, who don't work under contract, also aren't held accountable for using their leave time.
Arlene Espinoza, president of the Association of California State Supervisors, said managers' jobs often demand forgoing time off.
Furloughs, staffing shortages and increased workload brought on by new laws or higher demand for services all add to the pressure to keep working, she said.
"It's the fine line you walk as a manager to meet your responsibilities," said Espinoza, a DMV manager who has been with the state for 29 years.
Trading leave for cash
Over the years the state government has used employee leave like a credit card. It's traded leave for hard cash when it couldn't afford pay increases or to settle lawsuits.
In 2003, for example, Gov. Gray Davis and the unions agreed to give state workers more time off instead of a scheduled 5 percent raise. More than 3 million of those leave hours remain on the books with a current value of $118 million. When state workers retire or quit, that time will be cashed out at their departing pay rate, not what they earned in 2003.
Four years earlier, the state coughed up time instead of cash to settle a lawsuit the state lost over issuing IOUs instead of paychecks to 13,500 workers during the 1992 budget impasse. About 58,000 of those hours, equal to $2.2 million in pay, are still in affected state workers' leave banks.
The state also is carrying 1.2 million hours of leave from a three-year stretch during Gov. Pete Wilson's administration that cut state employee pay by 5 percent in exchange for commensurate time off. The "personal leave program," which ended in 1994, is a $48.5 million liability today.
Of the 17 types of state leave that have cash value, only two count against the government's cap: vacation time and "annual leave," a block of hours given to managers, supervisors and some rank-and-file employees instead of vacation time or sick time.
Other categories include "professional leave," a paid day off that reimburses lawyers for their professional dues, and "on call assignment," time off given to staff who make themselves available to be called into work during their off hours.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's furlough policy has added to the state's running leave tab. State workers have to take those three unpaid days off each month before they can take paid leave. State workers last year used a third less of their paid vacation than in 2008, a tangible sign the program is carrying deferred leave costs that will echo for quite some time.
"We anticipate that when furloughs end, ... employees will begin using more vacation time," said Jolley, the Department of Personnel Administration spokeswoman. "This is not going to be paid out all at once. It will be paid out over many years."
