CITY HAS STRUGGLED WITH OT PROBLEM FOR YEARS
Article Launched: 02/03/2007 02:14:19 AM PST
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."