BUFFALO, N.Y. — A Buffalo legislator wants to know how and why a clerk in the city’s fire department was kept on paid administrative leave for seven and half years, collecting nearly $600,000 not to work. Fillmore District Council Member Mitch Nowakowski also wants the city’s comptroller to find out how many similar situations are hidden in the city’s payroll.
Nowakowski, chair of the Council’s Civil Service Committee, filed a resolution Monday asking Comptroller Barbara Miller-Williams to perform an audit to find out how many city employees are being paid to stay at home, why, and for how long — and what the “relevant city entities” are doing to return them to work or get them off the city’s payroll.
The resolution is a response to Investigative Post’s report last week about Jill Repman, formerly known as Jill Parisi, who was accused in 2016 of tampering with the fire department’s payroll to pad her paycheck. According to the city’s law department, there was never any arbitration hearing to address the disciplinary charges the city brought against Repman.
Instead, according to payroll records, the city simply kept paying her.
