ALBANY’S KICKBALL COUP: Do you wish you could triple, quadruple or even quintuple your salary? Four mid-level state IT workers figured out one way to do it: by raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars in overtime through payouts that budget experts say are highly unusual — if not scandalous. New reporting from POLITICOPro shows the state’s Information and Technology Services department allowed overtime expenses to balloon during Covid, with 30 employees collectively being paid about $3 million in overtime in 2021. That amounted to nearly half the 4,000-employee agency’s OT expenses that year. And the agency’s four highest-paid employees that year were able to quadruple or quintuple their salaries by exploiting the agency’s lax overtime policies.
But here’s the kicker (literally) — the agency’s top overtime earner was on the kickball field while billing hours to the state, according to people who knew him and witnessed it happen. Matt Peplowski — a mid-level employee at the agency — nearly quintupled his $66,258 base salary in 2021 by earning over $206,000 in overtime and $53,000 in other pay that year, bringing his total salary to $326,575.
He’s one of more than 30 low- and mid- level IT employees with similar salaries who at least doubled their pay through overtime in the years after the pandemic. Peplowski declined to comment. “For this to extend into 2021 is scandalous,” said Ken Girardin, the director of research at the Empire Center — a fiscally-conservative think tank that tracks government spending and salaries in New York — which provided POLITICO the salary data upon request.
“Something like this happening in 2020 was unavoidable, something like this extending into 2021 is inexcusable," he said. Aside from the manager of the state’s retirement fund, the 2021 overtime earnings made Peplowski the highest paid state employee from the executive branch who was not working in higher education or health care, according to data from the Empire Center, a fiscally-conservative think tank that tracks government salaries and provided POLITICO the salary data upon request.
He also currently acts as league coordinator for the ClubWaka Albany kickball league, a paid post he held while simultaneously collecting his quintupled 2021 paycheck. “He used to talk about during the pandemic, how he worked 100+ hours a week,” said a person who heard Peplowski’s remarks and was granted anonymity to discuss the matter. “He said he was clocked in while at kickball."
“He was blatantly and openly taking advantage of the situation regarding Covid pay and I remember him being braggadocious about his wealth,” another said. ITS’s overtime expenses grew to more than six times its pre-pandemic rate during from 2020 to 2022, according to data from the state comptroller’s office.
Scott Reif, chief communications officer at ITS, did not answer POLITICO’s questions about whether then-ITS director Angelo Riddick or other heads of the agency were aware of the exorbitant overtime pay. When asked to explain Peplowski’s earnings, Reif also refused to break down what the $53,000 in additional other pay collected by Peplowski accounted for.
“As you know, this was a unique and unprecedented time in history, and ITS was at the forefront of the state’s massive COVID response for nearly 19 months,” he said in a statement. “Like many agencies on the front line, ITS operated 24-7 on behalf of our client agencies and vulnerable New Yorkers. ITS employees worked extraordinary hours and always remained ever ready to assist in support of the State’s response and recovery efforts.”
Simple back-of-the-envelope math shows Peplowski’s and others’ overtime pay would have been extremely tough to pull off given the time constraints. At 1.5 times his hourly rate — the overtime pay rate listed in the ITS employee handbook — Peplowski would have had to work about 4,347 overtime hours in addition to the 2,088 hours he would normally work to bring in the pay he received.
With only 8,760 hours in a year, that leaves just 2,325 non-working hours for him, giving him just 44 hours a week off. That amounts to 365 days straight of 18 hour work days. Reif would not provide POLITICO with the timesheets for Peplowski and the other employees who received the exorbitant overtime pay. A public records request for Peplowski and others’ timesheets remains pending. — Jason Beeferman
| 
