Fargo Commissioner Wants Commission Approval For Any City Staff Overtime Pay

FARGO, N.D. (KVRR) — Fargo Commissioner Dave Piepkorn wants any city staff overtime to be approved ahead of time by the commission.

He referred to a Forum article over the weekend about the city paying out over $31 million in overtime in the past decade.

Piepkorn says one employee made $80,000 in overtime in one year and says overtime needs to be stopped.

Mayor Tim Mahoney says Piepkorn needs to be “schooled” since the city has a lot of staff that work overtime from street crews to fire and police.

He also says it is 3% to 5% of the budget and has been budgeted for 20 years.

Commissioner Denise Kolpack says that the commission already approves budget line items that include overtime and they already have oversight.

“To every employee who agrees to work overtime or is told they must work overtime, thank you for serving Fargo. And to every employee I apologize that working overtime has been villainized.,” said Kolpack.

“As a city commissioner to read this in the paper I had no idea this was going on. So I would apologize to the public our taxpayers because I clearly have not been doing my job,” said Piepkorn.

In the end the commission voted to delay any action for two weeks to allow public input.