July 17, 2025 -- The Lackawanna County Prison has answered the county commissioners’ challenge to reduce overtime costs. From January through the first pay period in July, overtime declined by more than 57%, nearly $900,000, compared with the same period of 2024.

At Thursday’s meeting of the Lackawanna County Prison Board, Commissioner Bill Gaughan thanked Warden Tim Betti and his staff for taking up the challenge he gave them, during last year’s budget deliberations, to vastly reduce overtime.

From January through the July 1 pay period, the prison spent $668,069.72 on overtime. For the same period in 2024, it spent $1,561,657.38 – a difference of $893,587.66. The 2025 prison budget includes $2.5 million for overtime, but the expenditure to date, through more than 50% of the budget year, is about 27% of that allocation.

Betti attributed the overtime decline to multiple factors, including that the commissioners have worked with the prison administration and the Human Resources Department to keep the number of vacancies to a minimum.

“We have been filling part-time officer positions more aggressively than in the past,” Betti said. “We use those part-time officers to fill in for the shifts of full-time officers who are out on workers’ compensation and to fill in for fulltime vacancies.”

The warden also said that he and his staff have implemented key administrative changes, focusing on operations and policies that create overtime.

For example, he said, the prison has increased the time required for corrections officers to notify management of the use of vacation time for days off. That enables the administration to better plan to fill open shifts.

Betti also said that the prison’s Records Department, along with the Court Administrator’s Office, has done a better job of tracking inmates’ status, ensuring timely releases. That and other monitoring of the prison population have enabled the administration to close one minimum security unit, Betti said.

Gaughan said the development is integral to improving the county’s financial condition.

“I get that the big headline last year was the substantial tax increase that we had to pass to eliminate the massive structural deficit we found when we took office,” Gaughan said. “But we also implemented substantial management and operational reforms and tasked our department heads with doing better. The warden and his staff are demonstrating that it can be done. If this performance holds for the remainder of the year it will be a major help with the 2026 budget.”