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About three years ago we all heard from Rob Cote how the overtime was "out of sight" at the Warwick Fire Department even though Warwick hired many new fire fighters "to lower or eliminate overtime". Not being the type of person who takes these comments at face value I spoke to several firefighters about the issue. I asked why hiring many new fire fighters didn't actually decrease the overtime.

Here's what I learned. (and I wrote about it in the Warwick Beacon at that time)

Warwick received hundreds of thousands of federal dollars to train these new fire fighters.

BUT

Some lazy spread-sheet data entry person decided that rather than create a new column labeled "training" he/she just stuck all the federally-funded training hours under "overtime". Therefore is looked like Warwick taxpayers were paying that overtime money but, in fact they were NOT. Subtract the "training hours" from the total overtime hours and the remaining overtime hours DID GO DOWN!

I agree with Tom Kenny. There were comments in the Block and Cote article that were blatant lies!

Happy Spring/Summer everyone.

Rick Corrente

The Taxpayers Mayor