California state departments have allowed their employees to amass vast amounts of unused leave and vacation time, enabling hundreds of workers to leave state service with payouts topping $100,000, a California Watch investigation scheduled to run on Sunday shows.
Under state rules, most employees are allowed to carry over 80 days, or 640 hours, of vacation time from year to year, but records and interviews show those rules are often not enforced. As of December 2008, more than 14,000 state employees had exceeded their vacation caps, according to state documents.
In all, the state paid at least $486 million between 2006 and mid-2009 to compensate employees for time-off benefits they never used.
State departments offered a range of explanations for why their employees exceeded the cap. Emergency services departments such as the California Highway Patrol and CalFire, for example, argued that the unique and unpredictable nature of their work requires many of their employees to cancel vacations in order to deal with emergencies.
Other departments said that they are understaffed, requiring their employees to work more often, or that rare one-time events have caused banked vacation to spike at particular times.
Furloughs have also caused the amount of banked vacation in many departments to skyrocket. A Senate study released last fall shows that workers in the state’s prison system have banked upwards of 500 percent more vacation than usual since furloughs began.
Read more about the issue on Sunday here at Californiawatch.org, including a database of the payouts.
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