The city of Albuquerque has just released its list of the top 250 earners in city government for 2018, and guess who's at the top?
This isn't hard. It's APD's human robot Simon Droibik. He made $192,973.23 in 2018, leaving every other city worker in his financial/overtime dust.
As we reported last year, Drobik, who is a patrol officer whose official salary is $31.50 an hour, put in massive amounts of overtime that boggle the mind. In one two-week pay period, Drobik billed APD for an astounding 275.66 hours of work. That apparently included 84 hours of overtime, 57 hours of regular pay, seven hours of chief's overtime and 22 hours of something called contract based overtime. But while putting in more than 160 hours of regular work and overtime, Drobik still managed to get 10 hours of holiday pay and 13 hours of paid leave, according to payroll records.
Drobik was working an average of 100 hours a week, pretty much seven days a week.
Here's another highlight from Drobik's pay records. On Sunday, Feb. 18, 2018, he billed the city for 26 hours of work. That appears to have included 10 hours of overtime for having worked a holiday, and 10 hours for having taken the holiday off. It also included 10 hours of Chief's Overtime.
On another day, Friday, April 13, billed the city for 24 hours of work. On two other days, Drobik billed taxpayers for 22 hours of work.
The list of the top 250 earners isn't surprising.
Seventy-eight percent of those top earners are either cops or firefighters. The list includes commanders and deputy chiefs and such. But when you figure just cops on the streets--patrolmen, sergeants and lieutenants--it comes to 119 people, or 47.6 percent of the total.
It means that street cops, perhaps inspired by Drobik's incredible feats of overtime, are also working huge amount of overtime.