Tag Archive for: firefighter compensation

Manhattan Beach Firefighter Average Pay $328K Per Year

Negotiations between the Manhattan Beach Firefighters Association and the Manhattan Beach City Council have been stalled since May, when an impasse was announced. As reported in a local publication serving Manhattan Beach and nearby cities, firefighters and their supporters packed a July 19 city council meeting to urge the council to alter its stance in labor negotiations.

In the article, “Firefighters from Manhattan Beach and their supporters storm City Hall,” some of the firefighter union’s positions were noted. One of them was for the firefighters to receive “the same cost of living salary increases the other city unions received over the last 3.5 years, a period during with MBFA has not received an increase.”

In that regard, it would be useful to report what full time firefighters with the Manhattan Beach Fire Department earned in 2021, using data downloaded from the State Controller’s website.

A few things should be called out in the above chart. First – the employee compensation data the City of Manhattan Beach reported to the State Controller did not include any allocation of the payment the city makes towards the unfunded pension liability. This means the numbers you see in the “pension” column are for the so-called “normal cost” and therefore no argument can be made that they are inflated. One could make the argument that since no allocation whatsoever is made to active duty firefighter compensation to account for the city’s substantial unfunded pension debt, the average per firefighter pension costs reported here are understated. But that’s material for another story.

Next, the context in which Manhattan Beach firefighters claim they have not received cost of living increases commensurate with what other city unions received over the last 3.5 years might reasonably include how much firefighters earn in other cities. Here, using 2020 data, is average compensation for full time firefighters in the 25 largest city departments in California. The yellow highlighted top four all include payments on the unfunded pension liability in their reported data and therefore probably overstate the total compensation. As can be seen, however, even taking that into account, only one city, Santa Clara, reports total compensation in excess of Manhattan Beach. None of the other cities are even close. This data is one year old, but it is a safe bet that Berkeley, for example, did not increase its total firefighter compensation by 28 percent ($71,000) in one year [(328/257)-1].

Finally, what stands out with respect to Manhattan Beach firefighter compensation is the large amount of overtime they’re earning, $94,000. None of the major cities have anything close to that in overtime expense. Why is this?

In a letter the City Council released on July 19, the city attempted to explain this, writing:

The Firefighters’ Association has repeatedly stated they receive overtime for hours worked beyond their normal hours. This is not true. Just because a firefighter receives overtime does not mean they are working time over their regularly scheduled hours. For example, a firefighter can be on vacation for two shifts but work another shift in the same week and receive overtime. Similarly, two firefighters can work each other’s vacation shifts and receive overtime without working any additional hours. This is because vacation, holiday leave, and injury pay count as “hours worked” to qualify for overtime.

One of the City’s proposals to reduce overtime addresses the current system in which every shift taken as leave is automatically backfilled with overtime by allowing shift trades (two firefighters working for each other). This proposal allows employees to take the same amount of time off while reducing the payment of time and a half overtime when firefighters are not working any additional hours. This, in effect, limits the number of shifts that will be backfilled on an overtime basis. The City is also proposing to remove the ability to convert unused sick leave into vacation, which creates further backfill of overtime. The Association has not agreed to these simple provisions because it will reduce the amount of overtime pay they receive.

In plain English, what the city council is saying is that Manhattan Beach firefighters game the rules to collect overtime even though they aren’t working extra hours. It is reasonable for the city council to attempt to rewrite the rules so this will stop.

Compensation and benefits for public safety personnel is a fraught topic, and hyperbole does nothing to foster constructive outcomes. How much should a firefighter make? It’s fine to throw out statistics that prove the average life span of a retired California firefighter is actually somewhat greater than that of the public at large, or that statistically, a cashier behind a liquor store counter is more likely to die on the job than a firefighter. But that fails to take into account the fact that a horrific conflagration, such as the World Trade Center bombing, could alter those statistics overnight, and firefighters go to work with that knowledge every day. Liquor store clerks, as we have learned, provide essential services, but they’re not the ones who come running to help when our house is burning down, or a family member is having a medical emergency.

Using statistics also can overlook the fact that the value of life has never been so precious. A century ago, disease, war, and accidents claimed lives with such frequency that death was a normal part of life. Today, especially in a city as wealthy as Manhattan Beach, death is never routine. Citizens therefore have never had higher expectations of their fire departments than they have today, and better service is going to cost more. Unfortunately, this makes it hard to argue with a firefighter who is a member of the community and believes they deserve a raise. But in Manhattan Beach, with respect, they don’t.

Firefighters that collect a pay and benefits package in excess of $300,000 per year are not underpaid. Maybe they can’t afford a home in Manhattan Beach. But that’s because nobody can afford a home in Manhattan Beach. Maybe it’s gotten harder to recruit firefighters. But that’s because it’s gotten harder to recruit anyone to take jobs in recent years.

Firefighters in Manhattan Beach should ask themselves: Is my job harder than one in San Diego, where the average firefighter pay and benefits package is less than half what it is in Manhattan Beach? Clearly it’s not. Work through a Saturday night in downtown San Diego, and compare that to working the night shift on a weekend in Manhattan Beach. There are over 30,000 full time firefighters in California. To pay all of them what firefighters make in Manhattan Beach, instead of what firefighters make in San Diego, would cost taxpayers $4.5 billion per year.

Maybe Manhattan Beach firefighters, along with the unions representing firefighters in other cities, might reconsider their involvement with organizations that are destroying the quality of life in California. They might reconsider their political alliance with leftist unions such as the CTA, or the leftist California Labor Federation headed by Lorena Gonzalez. Maybe they should consider using their political power to create jobs and opportunities in California by supporting legislation that helps small businesses and rolls back extreme environmentalist regulations. If they did that, maybe we could lower the cost of living in this punitively expensive state. Doing that would mean everyone, in effect, would get a raise.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

Manhattan Beach Firefighter’s Earn Over $300,000 Per Year

There is now a $300,000 club for California’s firefighters. In the City of Manhattan Beach during 2018, the average pay and benefits for a full time firefighter were $300,242. While the Manhattan Beach firefighters, at least through 2018, belong to an exclusive club, twelve California cities pay their firefighters over $250,000 per year, and 69 California cities pay their firefighters over $200,000 per year. Are these levels of firefighter pay appropriate? Are they affordable?

Its perfectly understandable that nearly everyone, in a perfect world, would not consider any amount of compensation too high for a firefighter, given the work they do. On the other hand, we don’t live in a perfect world. Ordinary Californians face unprecedented financial challenges, nearly all of them caused by public policies that have raised the costs for everything – housing utilities, gasoline, and taxes. It costs twice as much to live in California as it costs to live in most states in America. Why should firefighters in particular, and public employees in general, be exempt from the misery the politicians they elect are inflicting on everyone else?

These policies are the product of California’s long standing one-party regime controlled by oligarchs and public sector unions, buttressed by the politically useful fanaticism of social justice warriors and environmentalist extremists. Just in California, public sector unions collect and spend over $800 million dollars per year, and there is no political special interest, anywhere, that has the slightest interest, much less the ability, to ever seriously challenge them.

One reform minded donor of moderate means, who did not want his name used, speaking about the power of government unions in California’s local politics, had this to say about an election a few years ago in a small California city: “A candidate who I asked to stand up to the unions on issues of compensation and pensions set me straight. He said ‘look, the firefighters union will spend $100,000 dollars to either elect me, or to elect my opponent, and they’ll do it every election. Do you have anyone who is prepared to do that?'”

The answer is of course not. Maybe once in a great while, somewhere, a maverick steps up with a pile of money and supports a reform candidate. Maybe they even acquire a majority on a city council. But like the Eye of Sauron, the unions find and focus their attention on the rebel insurgency, and in the next election, yielding to overwhelming financial might, control passes back to the union friendly candidates.

How to Calculate Average Pay for a Firefighter in a California City

To make the calculations reported here, raw payroll data for California’s cities in 2018 was obtained from the “downloads” page of the California State Controller’s “Government Compensation in California” website. The “2018 City Data” file contains 338,874 individual payroll records for employees of 483 cities. To get at the rate of pay for full-time firefighters, the data was filtered in two ways.

First, individual records for all part-time positions were excluded. This was done by eliminating any records where the base pay reported was less than the amount showing as the minimum rate of pay for that position. This eliminated records where an employee didn’t work a full year either because they were hired, terminated/retired, or transferred before a full year had elapsed. Next, records were eliminated in any case where base pay was less than $30,000 to eliminate part-time workers. Finally, records were eliminated if there was no employer expenditure for the defined benefit pension or for health insurance.

Second, individual records were then screened to only retain those which had the consecutive characters “fire” either as a separate word or as letters within a word (such as “firefighter”) either in the department description, or in the description of the job title.

It is important to emphasize that this methodology necessarily understates the averages that were calculated, for a few reasons. A record reporting base pay in excess of the minimum specified, but less than the maximum, can still be for someone who didn’t work a full year in the position. Similarly, a record reporting pay in excess of $30,000 can still be for a temporary position. And swept into the pool of records when admitting any job where the letters “fire” is within the department or the job title will include most of the fire department administrative personnel whose pay scales are far below and unrepresentative of actual firefighters.

What is the Average Pay for a Firefighter in a California City?

The average total compensation for a full time firefighter in a California city is $207K per year. This consists of $105K in base pay, $40K of overtime, $14K of “other pay” (including “lump sum pay”), for an average total pay before benefits of $159K. Total compensation, as any sole proprietor is viscerally aware, also includes how much your employer shells out for benefits. In the case of firefighters in California’s cities, the cost for the average employer paid benefits added another $49K, with $33K of that being a contribution towards their retirement pension, along with $16K for other benefits, mostly current health insurance.

Shown below, in a table too lengthy to include in the body of this report, are the results for the 201 California cities that directly employ firefighter personnel. But there are a few additional nuances relating to these calculations that are too big to pass over in any serious discussion of firefighter compensation in California.

First, there is the so called UAAL payment, which 28 cities still report (those highlighted in yellow on the chart below), and 173 cities do not. The acronym UAAL stands for “Unfunded Actuarial Accrued Liability.” That is the amount by which the pension system for any given California city is unfunded, i.e., the amount by which the assets invested on behalf of each city in the pension fund are exceeded by the present value of all retirement pension payments they estimate they will eventually have to make.

The UAAL payment, or “catch up” payment, is the amount, per employee, that the city is paying each year to catch up and bring their pension funding status back up to a financially healthy level. This is an abstruse concept, but it has profound financial relevance.

An obvious way to illustrate this relevance, referring to rows two and three in the chart below, is to compare the average pension payment reported by cities that included their UAAL payment, $42K, vs. the amount reported by cities that did not, $24K. Does the UAAL payment belong in a calculation of firefighter compensation? Some would argue it does not, claiming the amount is overstated because it is apportioning a payment only to current employees that ought to also be spread over retirees. Others make the rather strained argument it does not because if the pension fund underestimated how much money they’d need, that should not impact how much we estimate firefighters are earning in any given year.

There are a few ways to reconcile these arguments, none of them perfect. At varying levels of precision, from evaluating every individual actuarial record including that of retirees, to simply picking a number that seems reasonable, you could apportion some percentage of the UAAL payment, but not all of it, to current employee pension benefit payments. Or you could not include any UAAL payment, but add to the normal pension payment that all cities report some additional amount based on a more conservative assessment of how much these pension funds are really going to earn over the next few decades. Both of these methods are valid; neither of them satisfy everyone. But it is reasonable to say that cities that did not include the UAAL payment (such as Manhattan Beach) have understated their firefighter compensation by around $10K per year, and perhaps those who have included the UAAL payment may have overstated their firefighter compensation by about that same amount.

Second, there is the so called OPEB payment, which very few cities make, and even fewer report. OPEB, which stands for “Other Post Employment Benefits,” primarily refers to employer payments for retirement health insurance premiums, which is a common and very lucrative benefit for firefighters. In most cases, OPEB is not pre-funded, that is, unlike pensions which at least in theory are supposed to be 100 percent pre-funded, OPEB payments are made by employers on behalf of their retirees as they are incurred, out of operating budgets, with typically only a small fraction of those payments drawing on pre-funded reserves. In any accurate assessment of total employee compensation, the cost of funding post-retirement health insurance via payments during working years should be included.

Taking all of this into account – the drift of part-time, transitory, and administrative positions into the pool of records to be averaged, along with the underreported cost of the UAAL and OPEB payments, means the true average cost for a full time firefighter in a California city in 2018 was not $207K, but probably closer to $220K. And every budget year, and at every contract renewal, and whenever they’re endorsing candidates or campaigning for new local taxes, they want more.

Exempting Public Servants Means They Will Never Support Reforms

If you don’t have to suffer the consequences of what your politicians are doing, you will be unlikely to call for new policies. Why should it matter if housing is expensive, if you are routinely collecting a pay and benefits package that amounts to $220,000 per year? Why should you feel pressure to pay off your mortgage before you retire, if you will be collecting a pension that is likely to be equal or greater than the pay you received when you were working?

Giving public employees taxpayer funded retirement benefits that differ significantly from what the rest of us receive via Social Security and Medicare creates a conflict of interests between public employees and the citizens they serve. It undermines the value of citizenship itself, by making ordinary private citizens eligible for a package of government benefits that are more comparable to (if not less than) what undocumented immigrants receive, while the far better path to job security, a middle class lifestyle, and retirement security lies with the privileged public sector.

This inherent conflict of interests plays out in countless ways that damage trust in government and undermine faith in American institutions. Why should we control our borders, if membership and dues revenue in the teachers union depends on increasing public school enrollment by any means necessary? Why, for that matter, should immigration laws at least favor newcomers who have job skills and can support themselves, if that would mean fewer unionized employees in public education and elsewhere within the public bureaucracies to provide for the special needs of the illiterate and the destitute? And how, for the record, does it help nations with out-of-control birthrates if a few hundred thousand end up in the public schools of Los Angeles County, when tens of millions are added to their burgeoning populations every year? But it surely does benefit the teachers union.

Which brings us back to California’s firefighters. Why did they march with the United Teachers of Los Angeles one year ago during the teachers strike? Why aren’t informed firefighters letting their union leadership know what an embarrassment this was? How many firefighters have studied the Vergara decision, or looked at data on charter schools?

If firefighters want to have a union and use its unwarranted power – because unions in the public sector elect their own bosses and work for entities that can raise taxes instead of facing competitive business realities – to pay themselves far, far more than they would make in a market based hiring environment, that’s bad enough. But at the least, use some of that political power to work for all the people. Stand up to the fanatical Left in this state.

Fight to lower barriers to building new suburbs on open land, instead of letting the oligarchs and greenies cram everyone into the footprint of existing cities. Fight to build more freeways instead of “light rail” that nobody wants to ride. Fight to restore sensible wildland management practices to prevent future infernos. And fight for school vouchers so we can save a generation of school children, regardless of where they come from and what they bring to the classroom.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

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