Maryland government agencies that have struggled for years to remain fully staffed — sometimes at the risk of safety to those working in facilities like prisons — have continued to spend hundreds of millions of dollars annually in overtime costs, even as Gov. Wes Moore’s administration makes progress on filling vacancies, according to public reports and payroll data.

State workers collectively earned $404 million in overtime earnings in 2024, a nearly 38% increase from four years earlier, according to The Baltimore Sun’s analysis of payroll data obtained through a public records request.

Overall earnings for state workers, which include regular salary and other compensation, have risen at a similar rate, as workers receive what they describe as long overdue — and still insufficient — raises.

But the continued reliance on overtime underscores several challenges facing State House leaders.

Personnel costs are one of the top reasons behind a $3 billion budget deficit this year and an even longer-term structural deficit. Some have proposed freezing the state’s hiring practices or reducing already-scheduled raises to help trim costs.Others say those ideas would be counterproductive, only worsening issues like overtime that have long been both expensive and demoralizing for the public workers.

“To the extent that we impose freezes on those roles, it only exacerbates overtime and exacerbates the condition within the facilities,” Moore’s budget secretary, Helene Grady, said Tuesday in a public hearing about personnel costs.

Grady said the administration disagreed with a new recommendation to not provide 1% cost-of-living adjustments that were negotiated with union leaders last year and are set to begin in July. That move, according to the nonpartisan Department of Legislative Services that made the recommendation, would save $238 million for the state.

She also defended Moore’s budget proposal, which calls for adding 957 executive branch positions to the roughly 51,500-person workforce — an increase that workers and union officials say is still far from enough to make progress on the issues of overtime and employee safety.

At least one key legislative leader, though, isn’t ruling out anything as lawmakers continue in their quest to make more cuts.

“Attracting and maintaining the workforce has been something that we have been trying to push in the last few years, but we are in very tight financial straits, and so we’re looking at every possible adjustment,” Senate President Bill Ferguson said Tuesday.

“We recognize the critical work that our state workers do and so we’re mindful of the impact on their own finances, but … it’s one of the items on the table.”

‘I’m the face of all those hours’

In a state government that paid $8.8 billion to workers in the 2024 calendar year, about 4.5% of the overall compensation came in the form of overtime, according to The Sun’s analysis.

The agencies that rose above the rest both in terms of total overtime paid and the proportion of overtime to their overall employee spending were public safety agencies, the Department of Health and the Department of Transportation.

Corrections and other law enforcement officers often have been hit the hardest, and recent years have been no exception.

The $205 million paid in overtime at the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services was about half of the entire state’s overtime expenses and about a quarter of the agency’s own payroll expenses. The Maryland State Police paid about 16% of its employees’ earnings as overtime, about $48 million total. The Department of Juvenile Services paid 11.2%, or about $19 million.

“I’m the face of all those hours of worked overtime, and I’m tired,” John Feeley, a correctional officer sergeant at the Maryland Correctional Training Center in Hagerstown, said Tuesday during public testimony at the State House.

Feeley, who is also the president of a local chapter of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, has been among the many corrections officers who’ve called on the state to step up its hiring and improve dangerous conditions in its facilities.

He said the corrections agency has spent more than $150 million annually on overtime since 2010 — money that he said could have paid for the officers they need and increased salaries for others. According to a 2023 report from his union, about 3,400 additional officers were needed statewide. Another state-backed analysis pegged the number at 2,500.

Without the reinforcements, Feeley said staff are forced to work in conditions where they’re on high alert at all times — where “you instantly get a pit in the bottom of your stomach” when a deputy lieutenant asks to extend a shift by eight hours multiple times per week.

“Going home to our spouse or loved one or even a pet is not a given anymore,” Feeley said. “There’s so much stress at this job from the time you clock in to the time you clock out.”

As about 35 workers dressed in green AFSCME union gear sat behind them in a State House hearing room, employees of other agencies testified about their overworked conditions.

A revenue specialist at the comptroller’s office — which paid just under $1 million in overtime in 2024, according to The Sun’s review — described lines out the door as taxpayers wait for services. A psychiatric nurse at Springfield Hospital Center highlighted the impacts of understaffing for positions like hers on both the health and corrections facilities, saying 160 beds could be available now to the 220 defendants “languishing in local detention centers” but who need psychiatric services.

Sen. J.B. Jennings, one of a few Republicans to question Grady during the hearing, said he agreed that prisons need to hire more officers and that every agency shouldn’t be cut equally. But he questioned whether some agencies could “do more with less.”

“I think we’re in that situation right now,” Jennings said. “There’s some other agencies (besides corrections) where we want to go and say, ‘Hey, now’s not the time (to keep hiring).’”

Moore, who has made filling employee vacancies one of his top goals, did not include employees or their compensation in the $2 billion in cuts that he proposed for the next fiscal year.

Under his administration, a net of about 1,700 employees have been added to the executive branch agencies, Grady said. And the decline in vacant positions from a peak of nearly 6,500 in October 2022 to 4,700 last April was the “first sustained reduction in vacancies since the Great Recession,” the Department of Legislative Services reported.

The nearly 1,000 new positions Moore’s administration wants to add in the next year are across all areas of state government. The most would be within the Maryland Department of Transportation, adding 92 positions to improve transit services and 78 positions for patrolling the new Purple Line in the suburbs outside Washington, D.C., according to an administration document.

Lawmakers will present their amended version of Moore’s budget in late March, which they’ve said could also change significantly depending on what happens with federal budget negotiations and President Donald Trump’s efforts to slash the federal workforce.

Lawmakers, employees and the Moore administration referred to those federal efforts Tuesday as discussions heated up on making changes at the state level.

“The chaos surrounding Washington right now should remind everyone how critical it is to have a fully-functioning government that can provide the core services of the state that taxpayers expect to be provided,” Moore spokesman Carter Elliott IV said in a statement.

Have a news tip? Contact Sam Janesch at sjanesch@baltsun.com, 443-790-1734 and on X as @samjanesch.