By just about any measure, Schenectady Mayor Brian Stratton has done a much better job with the city’s finances than his predecessor, Al Jurczynski — for which he has been duly, and almost universally, credited. But it seems this mayor can never get enough credit, and will take it even when it isn’t due. As he did last week when he claimed, after release of an already highly positive independent audit for 2007, to have dramatically reduced the police department’s excess spending on overtime.

Turns out that claim was misleading, made possible only by resorting to some Jurczynskian bookkeeping. It was good work on the part of Gazette reporter Kathleen Moore to discover this through a Freedom of Information Law request — but, of course, she shouldn’t have had to. It’s important that the city budget not just be in the black, but transparent.

The fact is, spending on police overtime didn’t go down in 2007, it went up. City Council authorized $1.84 million for it and $2.48 million was spent (in 2006, $2.4 million was spent). That’s $639,000 over budget, less than in 2004 and 2005, but still significant — especially when one considers that the city council has been allocating substantially more for overtime in recent years. It appears the city council is just being realistic: Management issues aside, there are some structural and contractual reasons for all that overtime.

Stratton, who has been a strong critic of excess police overtime in the past, may have reached the same conclusion as the council — i.e. solving this problem might not be possible, or at least so easy. So he simply declared victory in the overtime war — without honestly or actually winning it. He had his finance director quietly shift unspent funds from other areas of the police budget to the overtime budget, pumping up the overtime budget and — poof! — decreasing the excess overtime spending from $639,000 to just $80,000.

Ultimately, these transfers make sense and would have happened anyway (as they have the last couple of years, but with full accounting of the excess overtime), since the overall police department budget was in the black, and a major reason was the salary savings on unfilled jobs. But Stratton didn’t discuss the transfers at city council meetings or otherwise make them public. He just approved them and then created the impression that overtime was way down and “in check,” comparing it to other years when the accounting was done differently — in effect, comparing apples to oranges.

While credit is a nice thing for a political leader to have, credibility is essential. Next time, Stratton should remember this.