Overtime Over the Top in the Fire Departments
Firefighters and paramedics deserve good salaries and benefits for the dangerous work they do, and that includes a reasonable amount of overtime. But precisely what is reasonable needs to be redetermined by the City Council and the county Board of Supervisors in the wake of a Times report revealing unusually high overtime budgets. The limit should be somewhere short of the sky.
The county and city fire departments spent nearly $128 million on overtime last year. A few enterprising firefighters and paramedics earned more than $100,000 on top their regular salaries. These numbers raise plenty of questions.
Why not hire more firefighters? Fire officials, repeatedly facing tight budgets, insist it’s cheaper to use overtime than to hire new employees and pay for their training, benefits and pensions. That’s true in the short run, but the departments’ huge overtime budgets should prompt another round of calculations based on the cost of rookies versus seemingly unlimited overtime for veterans. In the long run, is it really cheaper to pay out hundreds of millions of dollars in overtime rather than expand the departments? Why not limit the number of consecutive hours a firefighter or paramedic can work? Isn’t there a fatigue factor or a point at which judgment is impaired?
Many departments limit an employee to 38 to 120 hours on duty before requiring 24 hours off. The county, at the top end of that range, allows firefighters and paramedics to work as many as five days and nights before taking a required day off. The city allows greater flexibility, and one firefighter--who lives out of state--worked 12 straight 24-hour shifts then was off 46 days in a row. Public safety demands that emergency workers not be burned out, and 12 round-the-clock shifts must be pushing the envelope.
Too much overtime is spent keeping a firefighter on duty to replace another who is vacationing, being trained or off for some other reason. Can’t the schedule be better managed? Can’t the city revive the pool of firefighters that once was used to replace off-duty firefighters at regular pay? That seems a bargain in light of the figures in the Times report.
Some departments, Chicago’s for example, have saved money by reducing staffing from six to five per truck. That’s a judgment call and best left up to the city’s new fire chief, William R. Bamattre, and county Fire Chief P. Michael Freeman. They have the expertise to determine whether their departments can provide an adequate response with fewer personnel per truck given the range of emergencies in this region.
The county overtime figures will be addressed by a consultant hired to review the department’s budget. The City Council has scheduled a meeting Monday on LAFD labor costs. That’s at least a start.
The fire chiefs simply have to justify these overtime budgets. They may complain that their staffing needs have long been overshadowed by the public demand for more police officers, and we think that’s a valid point. But we’re not clamoring for a massive buildup of either fire department. Yes, they need more troops. But until they get a budget increase, they need to manage their forces in a more economical fashion. That includes overtime, but within reason. The taxpaying public cannot stomach these sorts of paychecks.