Four San Jose fire battalion chiefs made more than $200,000 last year - more than the acting fire chief and even more than the city manager, San Jose's top-ranking employee.

And mid-level fire department officials dominate a newly released list of the city's 100 top-paid workers when overtime and other compensation are factored in - even though only a handful of fire officials crack the top 100 when ranked by salary alone.

One firefighter took home more than twice the top base pay for that position.

The situation illustrates the dramatic effect of costly overtime in the city's fire department - something San Jose officials have been wrestling with for years. But firefighters aren't the only ones beefing up their paychecks; one San Jose police officer, for instance, took home just over $175,000 last calendar year.

Just who those employees are, and exactly how much overtime they received, is tough to determine. San Jose officials refused to identify any of the 100 top-paid city employees by The Mercury News in 2005 sued San Jose over its refusal to disclose salary information by name. That lawsuit is on hold while a similar case is pending before the state Supreme Court.

At the newspaper's request, San Jose this week released lists of the 100 city employees ranked both by base salary and total compensation in 2006. For some positions, identifying those employees is easy; there are only one city manager, redevelopment manager and

police chief.

But the city's policy makes it impossible to know, for example, which officer among the police department's more than 1,300 sworn personnel took home that $175,369 salary last year, even though the maximum base salary for an officer is $86,000.

Police overtime kept in check

Police Chief Rob Davis said he didn't know who the officer was or why the pay was so high, but he speculated it was probably a busy homicide detective. Davis, whose base salary is $207,000 and who earned a total of $227,000 last year, said the low number of non-management police officers in the city's figures show his department has done a good job of keeping overtime costs in check.

Last year's 100 highest-paid employees included one police lieutenant, five police captains and one police officer.

By contrast, all 18 of the fire department's battalion chiefs, who each oversee a group of half a dozen stations in a geographic area, were among the city's 100 top-paid last year, though their base salaries of up to $129,000 don't crack the top 100.

Ten fire captains, in charge of individual engine crews, also were among last year's highest paid, even though their base salaries range only up to $103,000.

There also was a firefighter who earned $163,000 last year, not bad for a position where the base pay tops out at $80,000.

"It's definitely a concern," said Acting Fire Chief Darryl Von Raesfeld. Aside from the financial cost, overtime puts a burden on workers, he said.

Hire more employees?

The city's quandary, Von Raesfeld and others said, is whether it's more cost-effective to spend that extra money to hire more workers instead of paying overtime. Of course, new employees also require expensive benefits and may not be needed when fire activity is slow.

Randy Sekany, president of the San Jose Firefighters union, said the new figures show the city doesn't have enough firefighters to do the job and has among the leanest fire department staffs of any major city in the country.

"The workloads are out there, and they choose to fill them with fewer people," he said. "I understand that you don't want to be so fat in personnel that you're wasting public dollars, but give me a break. If they hired a lot of people such that there's no overtime, I'm fine with that."

San Jose is hardly the only city where overtime pay puts firefighters among the top earners. In Oakland, for example, seven of the city's 10 highest earners last year were in the fire department. That city's highest-paid employee was a fire investigator whose $266,000 total pay included $159,000 in overtime, according to city figures that, unlike San Jose's, break out data by name and clearly spell out how much overtime workers earn.

Peter Scheer, executive director of the California First Amendment Coalition, said San Jose's policy gives the public no means to determine whether the overtime problem is due to poor staffing or to people gaming the system to boost their pensions.

"Without the names, you can't really tell," Scheer said.

Fire department overtime has been a concern in San Jose since the early 1990s. In 2001, after fire department overtime costs peaked at $9.6 million, a city auditor's report attributed the problem largely to staffing levels and difficulties in estimating vacancies and absences to avoid overtime. A specialized computer program designed to track staffing levels and vacancies has helped the department do a better job of estimating its overtime needs.

Costs haven't decreased

But Vice Mayor Dave Cortese, who last year served on a council committee overseeing the department's progress in dealing with overtime, said that while the computer program has made overtime budgeting more predictable, the costs haven't decreased.

"It's still been creeping up," Cortese said. "We never have reversed it or stopped it."

While lack of manpower also has been a problem in the police department, overtime costs there have remained manageable. Davis noted that unlike firefighters, police officers are limited to three hours of overtime each two-week pay period, after which they can be compensated only with time off. That policy has kept overtime costs down but contributed to staffing shortages. In December, Davis told the council he needs 600 more officers and support staff over the next five years - a 35 percent increase in sworn officers.

Von Raesfeld - who earned a salary of $169,832 last year and total compensation of just under $207,000 - said his department has struggled to reach the right level of staffing as the city wrestles with budget deficits. The city just graduated 29 new firefighters in December, has another 29 in academy training and expects another academy to start in May, Von Raesfeld said.

But the department also expects a rush of retirements after the firefighters' next labor contract is settled through arbitration, he said.

The chief's goal is to reduce overtime without adding more employees than needed.

"Even if it's cost-neutral to hire or have overtime, OT does put a burden on people," Von Raesfeld said. "I'd rather have the people on board making straight salary than overtime."