;DETROIT -- Pay due to Detroit city workers going back as far as three years won't be delivered to all those owed before year's end, city officials said Tuesday.
   The city owes several hundred city workers pay for various jobs outside of their regular duties, such as overtime pay or filling in for other positions, the city's chief financial officer, Sean Werdlow, told the City Council on Tuesday. Most of those people owed -- and the city's biggest backlog -- is for Police Department employees.
   Boxes containing records of the money owed police workers were discovered earlier this year, Werdlow said. Employees of other city departments who are due money will get paid by September, he said.
   But fixing the problem with police pay "is extremely monumental," Detroit Assistant Police Chief Ella Bully-Cummings said. "Errors have been years in the making."
   The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the Police Lieutenants and Sergeants Association and the Detroit Police Officers Association sued the city in 1999 to force payment. The city lost the lawsuit, and was to have paid those employees by April 15.
   "In the lawsuit, the city agreed to do certain things that were not done," said Jimmy Hearns, of AFSCME Council 25. "The initial problems were to have been corrected in April."
   Bully-Cummings agreed that the city was to have met an April 15 deadline.
   "What we're trying to do is come up with a reasonable time table," she said. "We don't want to put dates on the table that we know we can't meet."
   The city is upgrading its technology and has hired more staff to help speed the process, Werdlow said. Neither he nor Bully could say when the city would finish correcting the payroll issues in the police department.
   Part of the delay stems from the Detroit Resource Management System project. The technology upgrade initiated under former Mayor Dennis Archer to help remedy payroll and contract-payment problems grew from an initial investment of $50 million to $150 million. The portion addressing payroll has still not been completed, and it won't be in place until the 2003-2004 fiscal year, Werdlow said.

Detroit News

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