On September 2, 2026, I met with Saratoga Springs Commissioner of Public Works BK Keramati to discuss a document regarding what appeared to be excessive overtime accrued by one of his employees during the second quarter of this year. The document was from a FOIL request. What was deeply disturbing was that it became apparent during the meeting that the Commissioner had not bothered to read the document beforehand, let alone familiarize himself with the issues it raised. As it turned out, his lack of knowledge about his department did not end there.
Context
As has become clear, gross mismanagement during the four-year tenure of Finance Commissioner Minita Sanghvi squandered the city’s financial resources and left us in dire circumstances.
To begin addressing this crisis, Finance Commissioner JoAnne Kiernan asked her colleagues on the Council to prepare presentations documenting the causes of each department’s past overtime use and the actions each Commissioner had taken to minimize it.
The presentations were done at the pre-agenda on 07/20/2026 in great detail and again at the Council meeting on 07/21/2026. As noted in a previous post, only one Commissioner failed to prepare for the meeting: the Commissioner of Public Works, BK Keramati.
At the time, Kiernan observed that one of Keramati’s employees had generated 189 hours of overtime during the second quarter. Keramati was unable to explain to Kiernan the specific circumstances behind the large amount of overtime accrued by this employee. He ruminated on the many possibilities and then agreed to get back to her about the employee.
Blogger FOILs For Documents
I inquired with contacts at City Hall, and the response was consistent. 189 hours of overtime was a lot of overtime to accumulate, particularly in the second quarter of the year when winter storms would not be being dealt with. So I Foiled for any documents related to the Department of Public Works (DPW) employee who was granted all that overtime during the second quarter of 2026.
Apparently, DPW tried to deny me the records. I was initially contacted by the city’s FOIL officer, who told me she had been informed by DPW that no employee had received 189 hours of overtime. She told me that she was aware of the exchange between Kiernan and Keramati at the meeting and would pursue the issue further. As it turned out, the employee referred to in the meeting had racked up 190.25 hours of overtime, not 189.
On August 26, 2026, I received a response to my FOIL. This was the document.
Now, the first thing a keen observer will notice is that the first two pages do not match the second two pages. They have different font sizes. The two pages with large type lack dates or other information that would allow their data to be logically linked to the other two pages. It makes it impossible to read the reports properly.
The next thing that leaps out at the reader is that an alarm was triggered 16 times, warning (“Mahoney Call, Reset Compressor”) that the compressor that makes the ice for the city rink needed to be reset outside regular hours. This required someone to go to the rink and address the malfunctioning machine.
The union contract requires that the city pay an employee who worked overtime at least 2.5 times their regular pay, no matter how brief the call is. This seems reasonable. If you are going to get someone up in the middle of the night, they should be compensated for the inconvenience. In this case, the employee is a supervisor and is paid at least $128.68 for the call.
According to the records released under this FOIL, the DPW has spent at least $2,058.88 on resetting this malfunctioning compressor. Bear in mind that we only have the records for the second quarter. The city may have spent even more during the period before and after the second quarter.
The Meeting
I contacted Commissioner Keramati and asked to meet with him to discuss these records and his department’s overtime. On Wednesday, September 2, 2026, I met with Commissioner Keramati in his office. I was surprised that he was alone. I expected a posse.
I asked Keramati if I could record our conversation for accuracy, and he told me, “Absolutely not.”
Before I could ask anything further, Keramati wanted to know why I was focusing on this one individual in his department for overtime when employees in all the other departments were also generating overtime.
Trying to be diplomatic, I offered that I had looked into overtime issues across all departments. What I didn’t say to him was that Kiernan had asked all the departments to provide an analysis of their overtime and that with the exception of himself, at both a public pre-agenda meeting and full Council meeting, there had been extensive discussions, including charts and graphs from his other colleagues on the Council documenting which positions were generating overtime, why they were generating overtime, and what possible steps might be taken to reduce it. He was the only one on the Council who had not prepared for these meetings.
I broached the issue of the inconsistencies between the pages I received in the FOIL. Keramati then began an extended speculation as to what relationship the pages might have. I thought at this point he might bring someone into the meeting who was familiar with the report, but he didn’t. Eventually I observed, “BK, you don’t know,” and he good-naturedly agreed.
I asked him whether, putting aside the snow-plowing season, an employee in DPW generating 190.25 hours of overtime in a quarter was an anomaly. He again speculated about all the crises that can hit DPW and generate overtime. I offered, “Then you don’t know.” He admitted he was merely speculating.
Given that Commissioner Kiernan had asked him to provide her with a report analyzing overtime in his department, his apparent failure to do so was troubling, and his lack of knowledge of the report that was the purpose of our meeting seemed very odd.
I asked him whether the problem compressor had been properly repaired or replaced. He acknowledged that there had been problems with the compressor at the ice rink but didn’t know its status. As it is now September and the city spent over $2,000 in the second quarter (which ended in June), it would seem to this blogger that the head of DPW should know the status of this critical piece of equipment.
A Troubling Experience
Commissioner Keramati seemed strangely removed from the fiscal crisis the city faces in general but, more particularly, uninterested and uninformed about overtime in his own department.
I was struck by how uninterested he was in the report on the individual’s 190.25 hours of overtime, as it was clear he had not studied it before our meeting. It was also disturbing that he seemed unconcerned regarding the status of the compressor that might be bleeding the city money.
Saratoga Springs Politics 