One employee costs the Detroit Department of Transportation over $40,000 in overtime pay being transported to and from work
The payments were not found to be an abuse of power, just poor judgment.
An oversight report found that overtime payments exceeding $40,000 were among other city resources wasted by the Detroit Department of Transportation (DDOT). The overtime payments were used to transport an employee to and from work in a city vehicle, and the payments occurred over the course of a year.
Detroit’s Office of Inspector General received a complaint that accused DeMarcus Garrett of abusing his power as a DDOT supervisor. Garrett asked staff to drive another employee to and from work, and he allegedly retaliated against those staff members when they refused to continue this transportation arrangement.
Garrett’s actions weren’t found to be an abuse of power
The situation began when a DDOT employee submitted a doctor’s note saying that they were unable to drive. To accommodate this employee, Garrett offered four paratransit driver trainers overtime if they drove the employee to and from work. Two of the trainers agreed, and Garrett would approve the $40,000 in overtime pay for them over the course of a year from November 2024 to November 2025.
Garrett claimed that this setup was approved by former DDOT leadership as a medical accommodation. However, the setup proved to increase liability for those trainers when one trainer got into an accident in a city vehicle in Clinton while driving the employee, as the Clinton Township is where said employee’s home was located.
While the situation increased liability for the city and used resources like fuel and money unnecessarily, the claims of the situation being an abuse of power, along with claims that there was retaliation, were unable to be verified by the Office of Inspector General. Now, Michigan may want to turn its attention to the strange error that resulted in thousands of residents being issued IDs with the same face on them.
The DDOT’s waste of resources led to recommendations for improvement
Garrett didn’t act alone in making these decisions, and the Office of Inspector General made several recommendations for the DDOT as a result of what was determined to be poor judgment instead of an abuse of power, which is unlikely to be the case in scenarios such as this one where ICE was accused of detaining two American citizens while they were on their way to enlist in the Marines.
Those recommendations include a requirement that medical accommodations and any other medical requests would need to be submitted through the city’s Family and Medical Leave of Absence (FMLA) vendor, a review of overtime policies, and training for the supervisors, all of which are meant to reduce future waste of city resources.
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