W2 not quite that large

The June 20th edition of the Lincoln Journal Star contained a letter to the editor from Michael James urging Mayor Buetler and I to work towards reducing the compensation of firefighters. I welcome advice and input, but I would like to clarify some information in his letter. Mr. Smith stated that the average firefighter's compensation was over $77,000, and that for the Emergency Services Division the average was over$100,000.

That sounded implausible to me, particularly since the entire budget of Lincoln Fire and Rescue this year is $27,230,616 and the department has 301 employees. Dividing the later in to the former yields $90,467  per employee, and that would include the pro-rated per-employee cost of maintaining 16 facilities, over 25 apparatus, a sizable amount of equipment, quite a bit of diesel fuel, and all the other operating costs involved in an urban fire and rescue department.

I pulled a spreadsheet of every employee's end-of-the-year pay for 2010. This was total pay, which would include salary, overtime, holiday pay, and so forth--the bottom dollar on the final pay stub.  The average firefighter, from chief to rookie, was paid $70,139 last year.  That includes all the firefighters regardless of assignment--paramedics, fire apparatus operators, battalion chiefs, assistant chiefs, the works  Take out the top brass, and the average drops into the high 60's

While 70K is certainly a nice salary in Lincoln, the impression that the average firefighter is pushing 80-100K is a bit over they  top. Maybe the author was referring not to salary, but to the "total cost of ownership" which includes insurance premiums, worker's compensation costs, and so forth. These non-salary expenses of employees are there in every single job to varying degrees, public or private sector.  Rest assured, though, that the average pay on a firefighter's W2 was way under the figures quoted by Mr. James

Firefighters don't make the rules on their compensation.  It is senseless to fault the union that represents them for trying to get the best deal possible for its members: that's what a union is supposed to do, and it is neither sinister nor un-American.  In fact, playing politics is as American as apple pie.  People and groups of all manner use the political process to pursue what they perceive as their best interests and to try to get officials elected who see things the same way. They do so with varying degrees of success, and on occasion, he who lives by the sword, dies by the sword.  Welcome to democracy.

It bears noting that the City doesn't make the rules on compensation either.  In Nebraska, the ultimate arbiter of public employee pay is the Commission of Industrial Relations, a creation of the State Legislature functioning under State statutes that establish the principal of comparability. The City effectively must pay its employees the same as similar jobs in similar cities as determined by the Commission. Suggesting that firefighters are overpaid and urging the Mayor and I to reduce their compensation is certainly Mr. James' prerogative, but right now, the rules of the game are set by State law.

I want citizens to have accurate information about firefighters' pay. They will have to decide for themselves whether they think that is too much, and if so, the remedy will need to start with a majority of Nebraska's State senators. They tweaked the law a little bit in the last legislative session, but it will be a while before we see what, if any, impact these changes have.

My interest is in having the best employees we can afford with the money the citizens are willing to pay for the service.  If there was no collective bargaining, we'd probably pay exactly like the non-union employers in the private sector: enough to attract and retain the type of employee that we feel we need to deliver the quality of services we desire, and to prevent them from jumping ship to our competitors who would work equally hard to lure the best ones away. Maybe the package necessary to do that would be lower, maybe not.

I can find hundreds of people who would be willing to serve as firefighter-paramedics or police officers for less than the women and men who hold those jobs now.  I'm not so sure we would be happy with the result.  I do not think that it is in the public interest for LF&R to become the place where paramedics cut their teeth before moving on to greener pastures as soon as they've got training and experience at our expense, and some of the folks who've offered to be police officers for reduced prices raise the hair on the back of my neck (which, by the way, is one of the few places on my head it is still located.)