Overtime pay questioned

Some Newport Beach Fire Department personnel make as much as $30,000 to $40,000 a year in overtime pay, Newport Beach City Manager Homer Bludau said.

That number is on the “high end of the spectrum” Fire Chief Steve Lewis acknowledged, but the fire chief said it wasn’t unreasonable for some of the department’s operational staff to earn as much as $20,000 to $25,000 a year in overtime pay.

The Newport Beach City Council examined the fire department’s overtime pay expenditures Tuesday after a city report on employee pay led to questions on how much the department was spending.

“We are very transparent, and everything we do is above board,” Lewis told the council during a presentation on pay expenditures.

The Newport Beach Fire Department is budgeted for about $81,000 in planned overtime this fiscal year, and an additional $878,000 for unplanned overtime, Lewis said.

The department is budgeted for an additional $1.4 million for vacation pay.

Most of the overtime pay goes toward ensuring that the city’s fire stations are always manned with at least 39 people to respond to emergencies, Lewis said.

Fire department employees sometimes earn overtime pay for mandatory training.

The department also has eight or nine vacancies that it is trying to fill, Lewis said.

“Nobody just gets overtime around here,” he said.

Department overtime pay is calculated on a 24-day cycle because of the irregular shifts firefighters often work, Lewis said.

The firefighters work 192 hours over the course of a 24-day cycle — anything above that is calculated as overtime pay, he said.

The department has tried to save money on overtime pay by encouraging its firefighters to swap shifts with one another, Lewis said.

The shift swaps are “gentlemen’s agreements” whereby one firefighter who wants to take a day off will trade a shift with another employee.

The stand-in firefighter doesn’t earn overtime pay in the exchange even if he or she works above and beyond regular hours.

A few council members asked whether the fire department could recruit firefighters to work part time in order to cut down on overtime payments.

Lewis claims that the city is actually saving money by paying overtime to its full-time firefighters rather than hiring part-time personnel because of the cost of providing benefits to city workers.

“I wonder if there isn’t the possibility of developing a pool of retired firemen who still want to work on a part-time basis for a wage but don’t need benefits,” Councilman Mike Henn.

Lewis said he was open to suggestions on cutting down overtime expenditures.

Reporter BRIANNA BAILEY may be reached at (714) 966-4625 or at brianna.bailey@latimes.com.