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PHOENIX (CN) — A Maricopa County Sheriff’s lieutenant told a federal judge Thursday he’s owed three years of unpaid overtime the Arizona county claims he’s exempt from earning because of the administrative nature of his job.
Though the Fair Labor Standards Act exempts administrative employees from earning overtime pay, Lt. Christopher Houck says his role falls under the act’s First Responder Regulation, which clarifies employees whose main duty is preventing and responding to crime are not exempt.
Houck learned months after his promotion to lieutenant in 2022 that he would not be receiving any overtime pay despite regularly working more than 40 hours per week. The county since 2007 has withheld overtime from lieutenants because they spend more time conducting office work like managing personnel, developing policy and reviewing paperwork than they do responding to emergencies.
Houck sued in 2023, arguing that a lieutenant’s main duty is still law enforcement, making him and all other Maricopa County lieutenants eligible for overtime pay.
“The county doesn’t keep the patrol lieutenants uniformed, armed and dispatched because they’re administrators,” Houck’s attorney Ty Frankel said in a Thursday morning hearing. “They do it because they are law enforcement officers.”
Frankel, of the Phoenix-based firm Frankel Syverson, said the county can’t determine a lieutenant’s main duty by tallying what tasks they perform most often and how much time they spend on each. If that method ruled, he said their roles would be redefined on a daily basis.
Instead, Frankel said the main duty of a lieutenant should be defined by what responsibility takes the highest priority. In the sheriff’s office, lieutenants have a nondiscretionary duty to respond to all high level emergency calls, regardless of other daily responsibilities.
“Administrative work always yields to law enforcement work,” Frankel said. “This is different from the captains above them who supervise them. The captains don’t respond to scenes.”
Frankel noted that most lieutenants in the sheriff’s office make less money than the non-exempt sergeants below them because the sergeants earn overtime.
Defending the county, Shayna Santiago of Fisher and Phillips argued that Houck and other lieutenants don’t qualify under the law enforcement regulation because they rarely conduct specific activities listed in the statute. Those activities include conducting investigations, performing surveillance and apprehending, interrogating and fingerprinting suspects.
Santiago said lieutenants admitted in depositions to rarely, if ever, performing those tasks. Despite Frankel’s argument, she said the amount of time performing each task is a legal factor in deciding whether an employee is exempt.
Contrary to Frankel’s previous assertion, Santiago submitted to U.S. District Judge David G. Campbell that not all lieutenants are required to be uniformed and armed at all times. But the possession of a uniform and the ability to respond to crimes does not change the nature of your job, she said.
If the sheriff himself put on a uniform and responded to an emergency, that would not make him eligible to earn overtime, Santiago said.
Frankel downplayed lieutenants’ administrative duties, telling Campbell that Houck has no power in hiring or firing, and has no authority to manage disciplinary action.
Campbell, a George W. Bush appointee, is considering both cross motions for summary judgment and the county’s motion to decertify the collective action. Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, members of a collective action must manually opt-in, as opposed to a standard class action in which all similarly situated parties are included unless they opt out.
But Campbell says he isn’t sure whether he can certify all 21 proposed plaintiffs in a collective action because their specific situations — like specific salaries and how much time each of them spends in the office — are so different.
In that case, Campbell asked Frankel whether he’d be required to hear testimony and evidence from all 21 lieutenant plaintiffs in a single trial, or hold 21 individual trials.
Frankel asserted that the Fair Labor Standards Act allows for Houck’s case to be representative of all plaintiffs.
Campbell didn’t say when he would rule.
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