Forest Firefighting Chiefs Ordered to Return Overtime Pay

As a firefighting expert for the National Park Service, Jim Loach left his Omaha home and spent what he said were countless hours this past summer, mostly in Oregon, to help manage the efforts of thousands of hard-pressed firefighters.

But it turned out Uncle Sam was counting his hours. Loach has been told he worked too much overtime and must pay back more than $12,000.

Loach is one of about two dozen experts in forest fire management for the National Park Service, Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management who in recent weeks have received demands to pay back some of their overtime earnings.

“Watching my time sheet wasn’t my concern,” Loach said. “I was getting out there and providing a service to the country, to get a handle on all those fires. That’s what we do.”

Loach said he’ll fight to keep the money he earned.

“This is patently unfair,” he said. “This doesn’t put you in the Christmas spirit.”

At issue is a federal law that limits pay for firefighting duties to a maximum of $121,600 a year. Even among the most seasoned government firefighters, most earn much less, even with overtime pay.

But some firefighters with 30 years or more of service who, because of their experience, are tapped to coordinate the firefighting efforts on the biggest blazes, make upward of $100,000. Loach said he earns $117,000 a year, without overtime, as one of the Park Service’s veteran fire managers. So it doesn’t take much overtime for people like Loach to reach the salary cap.

While the repayment demand has shocked firefighters, it also has caused a certain amount of embarrassment to the Forest Service and the Department of Interior, which oversees the Park Service and BLM.

Officials say they are trying to find a way to allow the firefighters to keep their overtime. They may have to repay it to meet the letter of the law and be reimbursed some other way. “We’re still trying to work out the logistics, but we’re going to make it right with them,” said Heidi Valetkevitch, a Forest Service spokeswoman. “There’s a legal requirement that we are operating under to pay back any overtime overpayments, but we think we have special authority to still give compensation, and we plan to exercise that authority. Right now, we’re going through a bureaucratic maze.”

She estimated that about 20 of the Forest Service’s most experienced managers received payback orders.

John Wright, spokesman for the Interior Department, said he knew of only one person who was paid too much, “and we’re going to try to work out a system that’s equitable to resolve this.”

He said Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton “instructed her fire folks and bureau directors to examine the issue for equitable ways to resolve these challenges.”

Fire officials say that even if they are not forced to pay back the government for last summer’s overtime, the issue needs to be resolved before it occurs again next year. This year, fires burned more than 7 million acres -- mostly across the West and nearly double the 10-year annual average. Because of the continuing drought, authorities are braced for next summer. The largest firefighting efforts are coordinated by the elite core of seasoned incident commanders who travel from one weeks-long fire to the next, managing thousands of firefighters.

The overtime pay issue “could have a huge impact on fire management in the future,” said Jim Paxon, who served as the spokesman for fire crews assigned to the mammoth Rodeo-Chediski fire, which burned nearly 500,000 acres in Arizona.

“If you tell me I won’t get paid for working ... uh huh, right. I wouldn’t be too excited about going to work for free, or having to pay the government back. I’ll find something else to do,” said Paxon, a Gila National Forest district ranger in New Mexico who will retire next month. “The salary cap affects the ones we need the most, our senior fire managers.”

John C. Bedell, the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest supervisor in Arizona, was told to pay back about $1,000 in overtime earned helping to manage the Rodeo-Chediski fire.

“It’s an outrage,” he said. “I was remotely aware of this maximum-pay thing, but it didn’t concern me. I was just dealing with the emergency at hand, and it never occurred to me to say that tomorrow I can only work 10 more hours, then see ya.”

Adding insult to injury, Bedell and others said, was that income tax and other deductions were withheld from their overtime paychecks, yet they are being told to reimburse the gross amounts.

“I’ve never encountered such a thing,” said Bedell, who after 39 years of service will retire April 3. He said he will probably pay the government back, if pressed.

Said Loach, “In my 32 years with the Park Service, I’ve never before exceeded the annual cap. If we were running up against it, I would have thought someone would have waived it, given how bad the summer fires were.”