New York transportation workers take home excessive overtime pay

Last year, an engineer for New York's Long Island Rail Road earned more than triple his base salary as a result of overtime and other perks, according to recent payroll analysis by the New York Daily News.

Dominick Masiello, whose base salary for 2010 was $75,389, took home more than $250,000, putting him on the agency's list of top 10 highest-paid workers for the third consecutive year.

Metropolitan Transportation Authority policies allows workers such as Masiello and LIRR conductor Dennis Reardon to cash out unused vacation and sick days when they retire.

Reardon was able to pad his $75,389 salary with $83,791.92 in overtime and $83,999.60 in unused sick and vacation days, the news source reports.

However, the agency's total payroll was found to have decreased slightly, from $5.21 billion in 2009 to $5.11 billion in 2010.

"These numbers reflect the enormous efforts we've taken to reduce costs, eliminating 3,500 positions and cracking down on unnecessary overtime," MTA spokesman Kevin Ortiz told the news source.

State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli launched an investigation into the MTA's spending last year, after an audit found that overtime payments had increased by 26 percent from 2005 to 2009, according to BusinessWeek.