The city violated the state wage and hour law by paying police recruits for a flat 40 hours per week regardless of how many hours they actually worked, according to the state Department of Labor.

Now the city is calculating how much money in retroactive overtime it has to pay out. Craig Manemeit, the city’s director of labor relations, has requested training academy records for the last two years. The statute of limitations under state law limits such cases to two years.

“We need to get the training schedule to see what hours (recruits) actually worked,” Manemeit said. “We’ll take the number of hours worked versus the number of hours paid and come up with a figure.”

How much that figure will be is speculative at this point, he said, and individual back pay will vary.

City payroll compiled a list of 104 people who could be entitled to payment. Some completed the entire 28-week academy, but others dropped out and would be owed less, as would members of the current academy class that’s about a month into its training.

While the grand total is anyone’s guess, Sgt. Louis G. Cavaliere, the police union president, estimated the total could be in the “hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

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