KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- Overtime pay is a nice benefit that puts a little extra in your pocket, but rarely do you make twice your salary.

KCTV5 News found a woman whose base salary is $42,336, but last year she took home $98,948, that's more than $56,000 in overtime pay, more than double her salary.

With numbers like that, you may be surprised to find out what she does and who she works for, and there are others. Roger Penn is a bus driver whose salary is $28,464, and last year he earned an additional $41,853 in overtime pay.

One employer that has imposed a hiring freeze paid out more than $1 million in overtime pay to 31 employees. The City of Kansas City, Mo., spent more than $14 million in overtime pay last year.

Four of the top five overtime earners work for the water department. The woman who doubled her salary is a dispatcher for the water department. The other is a bus driver who works at Kansas City International Airport.

So why did the city pay out millions in overtime pay last year? To find out, KCTV5 News started at the top.

Kansas City Mayor Mark Funkhouser said, "That doesn't rise to the level of something that I would look at as mayor. You're looking for the auditor. You're looking for the city manager."

When asked how someone could more than double her salary with overtime pay, City Manager Wayne Cauthen said, "I mean the fact of the matter is that's double her salary, a little bit more than double her salary, it would seem to me that it would probably have been more appropriate to hire another person."

"Where I sit as the city manager, it's my responsibility probably to hold my directors accountable to dealing with overtime with their particular staffs," Cauthen said.

KCTV5 News asked those directors to explain. The acting director of the city's water department refused a request for an on-camera interview. He announced his resignation the day after KCTV5's request.

A representative of the department said that the water department's overtime was a combination of emergencies, staff shortages and a backlog of water main breaks and leaks.

"We would like our crew staff and our vacancy rate to be back to a lower percentage than it is now," said Colleen Newman, a water department representative.

Mark VanLoh is the aviation director for Kansas City International Airport.

"It's not a challenge," VanLoh said. "It's just impossible. I don't have enough people. Out of a possible staff of 550 employees, I have a hundred openings, and I've had a hundred openings up here in the four years that I've been here."

That means paying people like Penn time and a half and sometimes double time to drive a bus, which he drove an average of 75 hours a week last year.

"He volunteers for everything we give him, love the guy," VanLoh said.

But until the city allows departments like aviation and water to fill their vacation positions there will be long hours and big paychecks for some city employees.

"It tells me it's worth looking at more. It tells me I need more information, more data. I need to figure out what's going on," Funkhouser said.

Cauthen said, "We'll talk to the supervisors to find out why this mode was working rather than doing something differently."

The city's fiscal year budget begins Thursday. The hiring freeze went into effect in March, just after the City Council approved the new budget, which called for millions of dollars in cuts. At that time, there were nearly 700 city jobs vacant.

None of those positions can or will be filled until the hiring freeze is lifted, and no one in the city knows exactly when that will be.