Overtime hours for officers at the Sarnia Police Service are the lowest they've been in over 20 years.
A report presented to the Police Service Board Thursday, March 27 said over 11,000 hours were put in last year, about $100,000 under budget.
Meanwhile in 2023, over 18,000 overtime hours were worked, and the highest was in 2007 at 23,189 hours.
Police Chief Derek Davis said while this is good news things can change.
"We just don't know what we're going to see from month-to-month, year-to-year, day-to-day, so what I can say is we diligently monitor. We've introduced new countability systems and we have a good team here that's using it appropriately," he said.
Meanwhile, the report said communicator overtime was $100,000 over budget at $140,000.
Davis said there have been new things implemented in the service when it comes to overtime.
"We have new systems for tracking overtime and make sure it's being called out appropriately. We look for other alternatives before we go to overtime," he said.
Davis said overtime is not necessarily a bad thing.
"Overtime is a tool that sometimes is the most effective thing to use based on the circumstance," he said. "Sometimes we need additional resources for a project or a particular initiative that it wouldn't be as cost effective to hire full time people, so we would use overtime for a short term project, as an example."
Davis added if the workload did go up, the police service would look at hiring more full time staff.
"Overtime is never something that will go away and overtime is a useful tool that we will always have. Incurring overtime is not a bad thing it just needs to be done correctly," he said.