VENTURA : Council to Consider Firefighter Pay Raise

The Ventura City Council will decide Monday whether to award a 6.5% salary increase to Ventura firefighters and specialty pay to paramedics for the next year.

An 18-month agreement has been brokered by the city and the firefighters association that would apply retroactively to July 1, 1995, when the existing contract ran out. It would expire Dec. 27, 1996.

If the agreement is extended annually, firefighters would also receive an additional 2% increase in July, 1996, and another 3.5% increase in July, 1997.

The agreement would cost the city $355,000 for fiscal year 1995-96, an additional $145,000 in 1996-97, and another $207,000 if the contract is extended for fiscal year 1997-98.

Firefighters and city officials have been negotiating since March for the pay raises, the first increases in more than two years for the department.

Half of the city’s 69 firefighters received a 2% salary increase in 1993. But since that was a longevity pay raise, not everyone was eligible, fire officials said.

“We were significantly behind the median of other departments,” said David Hilty, president of the Ventura City Firefighters Assn. “We had fallen behind quite a bit there.”

The 6.5% salary increase would bump the starting salary for a firefighter trainee to $31,522. Firefighters would earn between $34,655 and $44,230. And the highest-paid fire captain would earn $58,482.