CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Members of the team hired to monitor the city of Cleveland's federal consent decree on police use of force each make $250 an hour.

And in October, the team's first month of work, the 15 members billed the city more than $100,000 for their time and overhead expenses, according to invoices obtained by cleveland.com. (See a summary invoice in the document viewer below.)

The most billable hours were submitted by Charles See -- the team's director of community engagement, who also serves as the executive director of Lutheran Metropolitan Ministries' community re-entry program. See billed just under $15,000 for 59.3 hours and donated another 12 hours of his time, according to the invoices.

The team's expenses became an issue Wednesday at a City Council's Public Safety Committee hearing, which included an update on the monitoring team's work and goals for the coming year.

City Councilman Brian Kazy asked the team's leader, Matthew Barge, of the Police Assessment Resource Center, for each member's hourly rate. And Barge responded that no member is more important than another, so they all make $250 per hour.

When See mentioned, during the hearing, that he attended "five or six" of the recent protests related to a grand jury's decision not to indict two Cleveland police officers for the shooting death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, Kazy asked See if he billed the city for the time he spent at those rallies.

See said that, indeed, he had.

Barge emphasized that about 42 percent of the hours that team members spent on consent decree-related duties in October were on a pro bono basis - saving the city an additional $60,000.

Barge, himself, submitted invoices for 43 hours, plus travel costs, and worked another 124.4 hours pro bono. Three other members - Tim Longo, Modupe Akinola and Sean Smoot - donated more hours than they billed, according to the invoices.

Barge also reminded council that the city's contract with PARC caps the total cost at $4.95 million during the next five years. So even though expenses might be higher in the first year or two, they should level off by the third year, when new policies are in place and the team is spending less on-the-ground time forging new relationships within the community.

A preamble to the invoices goes on to explain that in the initial month, the team spent a lot of time getting a handle on where the police department currently stands on a "host of issues implicated by the consent decree." That work included ride-alongs with police and interviews with the command staff.

Last-minute travel inflated the expenses in the initial month, too. But going forward, the document suggests, the team will benefit from long-term planning and a negotiated "federal government rate" with two hotels downtown.