Halfway through the budget year, San Diego police say they have reined in how much they spend in overtime costs and project they will come close to being on budget — a rare accomplishment in recent years.

Elected city officials have said limiting police overtime is a priority. The department has gone over budget in that category in 12 of the last 13 fiscal years, often by several million dollars.

The department has about $45.3 million budgeted for overtime this fiscal year, which started in July. At this point, it projects it will spend $48.6 million paying overtime to its police officers. Although that appears to be overbudget, the department said the lion’s share of that roughly $3.3 million difference will be recouped because it primarily involves providing policing for special events that pay for the overtime costs, such as a San Diego Padres game, or for work funded by grants.

“I don’t always get to be the bearer of good news, but today we have some,” Police Chief Scott Wahl told the City Council’s Budget & Government Efficiency Committee on Wednesday when he shared the overtime costs and projections.

His announcement comes as the city grapples with a budget shortfall and makes unpopular moves to increase revenue, including charging for parking at Balboa Park. A news release from San Diego police Wednesday included a statement from Mayor Todd Gloria commending Wahl and his team “for managing their budget wisely, especially during this critical budget time.”

Wahl told the committee the department projects it will spend $6.5 million less on overtime than it did in the prior fiscal year. If that prediction holds, it will mark the second year in a row that police have dropped their overtime spending. Two years ago, it hit a decade high of $57.2 million. Last year, it was $55.1 million.

“Importantly, we were able to do it without negatively impacting our response times,” Wahl told the committee.

Response times for “priority zero” calls — the most serious calls, involving an imminent threat to life — averaged about 6.8 minutes as of December. Two years ago, that number was 6.6 minutes. Response times for priority one calls in that same period, however, increased from 31.5 minutes to 35.6 minutes.

If the budget projections hold, it would also be the first time in a decade that the department spent less year-over-year on overtime.

San Diego police officials say the department has long been understaffed, and on Wednesday the chief said overtime “remains a critical resource for our department.” The department is budgeted for 2,031 officers, but as of near the end of last month, it had about 1,836 sworn officers.

“With our extremely low staffing levels, we rely on overtime to maintain our service levels, maintain our response times and support special operations,” Wahl told the committee.

“This reduction didn’t happen by chance,” Wahl said. “We knew if we were going to cut overtime costs, we needed to take a hard look at how we track and how we manage those funds.”

He said the department “built an entirely new monitoring process that gives command staff the clear visibility into where overtime dollars are going.” That, he said, allows for “real-time oversight and better decision making.”

Here’s an example of one cost-saving measure. An officer’s regular day shift starts at 6 a.m. Data shows that it gets busy around 9 a.m., according to department spokesperson Sgt. Saum Poorselah.

Rather than having an overtime shift start at 6 a.m. and waste three hours of overtime, he said, that shift can be scheduled to start at 9 a.m. and spill well into the busy 2 p.m. swing shift. The same thinking and reliance on data goes into creating an overtime shift that starts at 5 p.m. and runs until 3 a.m., after the bars close.

“We are trying to be more strategic with how we are using our overtime,” he said.

The department has also streamlined how it makes overtime hours available with a centralized system that allows it to prioritize when and where officers are assigned.

In February 2024, the city’s auditor looked into the department’s approach to overtime. The audit found that the money San Diego spends on police overtime was below average relative to comparable large cities in California.

The audit found that police had not been prioritizing overtime shifts based on need, “creating the risk that more critical assignments go unfilled while officers sign up for less critical shifts.” The new centralized system addresses that matter.