Mayor George Flaggs Jr. put the weight of resolving the Vicksburg Fire Department’s overtime problems on Aldermen Michael Mayfield and Willis Thompson.

“I’m not getting attacked no more (over the fire department),” Flaggs told the aldermen at a Monday work session. “If you two gentlemen have a recommendation, I’m open to what y’all have got. I’m not chasing those rabbits no more, I’m out of the fire department business.”

Flaggs comments follow an Aug. 26 town hall meeting where he was criticized by resident Tillman Whitley over his treatment of Fire Chief Charles Atkins at a July meeting in which Atkins walked out of a planning meeting on the fire department.

The dispute over the organization of the fire department and firefighter overtime has been a continuous point of contention between Flaggs and Atkins for two years, and reached a peak when Atkins left the July meeting after being criticized by Flaggs.

Flaggs in April proposed changing the city charter so that it would give him authority to appoint a fire chief and oversight of the fire department. He was forced in June to withdraw the plan in the face of fierce opposition from Mayfield and Thompson.

Neither alderman offered a recommendation Monday to address the overtime.

Firefighters work 24-hour shifts. Under city policy, they work 2,912 hours a year and have 230 hours of overtime per year built into their pay, which is known as built-in overtime. Unscheduled overtime is overtime a firefighter receives if they are called to fill in for another firefighter because of illness or because a station is short-handed.

According to information from the city’s Munis accounting system the mayor presented Monday morning, the city has so far in the 2015 fiscal year has paid $751,462 for about 42,865 hours of firefighter overtime. The report indicated about 20,819 of those hours were built-in, or scheduled overtime, while about 22,046 were unscheduled overtime.

“So you’re running from the last pay period to this pay period with $31,000 every two weeks in overtime,” he said. “We have three more pay periods to go. The total for overtime could reach $800,000 or more.”

Using information from the city accounting department, as a comparison, Flaggs said a 3 percent across the board pay increase for city employees would cost the city $505,751, while a 4 percent raise would cost $674,334.

“My position is the fire department needs to be reorganized; it needs more oversight,” he said, adding he has tried in the past to make recommendations to control firefighter overtime and reorganize the department.

Mayfield said part of the problem is linked to the department’s lack of manpower, indicating it is short 16 people. “It goes without saying you’re going to have some overtime,” he said.

He said the board needed to meet with Atkins and deputy chiefs Kenneth Daniels and Craig Danczyk.

He suggested the board discuss the overtime issue in an executive session at the board’s Sept. 8 meeting, but Flaggs said the board could not discuss it in closed session because it was not an executive session matter.

“It has to be a personnel matter involving a specific person, not a budget matter or a policy matter,” City Attorney Nancy Thomas said.

“You still need to talk with the three chiefs, so it’s about personnel,” Mayfield said.

“It’s not about any person in particular, like a disciplinary matter,” Thomas responded.

Mayfield said the fire department handles several different duties — fire suppression, rescue and ambulance service and building inspection.

“It’s a big department that has a lot of avenues in it, so even if you get 10 to 15 more people, you’re going to have overtime because of the scheduling,” he said. “What we need to do is have checks and balances as best we can to alleviate the massive overtime that we have. I have no doubt it’s mainly because the lack of manpower.

“You have to realize the number of times the ambulances and rescue trucks run, we don’t run fire trucks as much as we used to, because we’re doing a great job of safety, but it (overtime) warrants scrutinizing to say the least.”

Thompson agreed the department’s manpower shortage is part of the overtime problem.

“We run 24 hours, and we have to make sure we have each station properly manned so we can properly respond,” he said. “Public safety is important. I don’t want to compromise the safety of the public.

“If you’ve got a recommendation on doing something different, I’m open to it,” he told Flaggs. “If it’s something we can do to run more efficient, I think we need to look at it.”

In other action, the board:

• Discussed oversight and changes the city’s Action Line system, which fields calls from residents about problems in the city. Beginning this month, work orders to city departments and Waste Management, the city’s solid waste contractor generated by calls to the Action Line will be copied to the aldermen and the mayor’s office.

• Rejected a proposed design for the Vicksburg Farmers’ Market pavilion. Flaggs said the design showed a two-story pavilion instead of a requested one-story facility and wanted it more open.