Agreements or policies that facilitate this type of activity may be more common than we know.

To help assure community and provider safety, communities should critically evaluate allowed practices that may lead to fatigue of personnel providing vital emergency services.

This report also highlights the staffing shortage in one of the country's largest fire departments.

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Nearly 200 Firefighters Made More than $200,000 Last Year, Amassing Thousands of Hours of Overtime

By Erica C. Barnett

January 24, 2025

https://publicola.com/2025/01/24/nearly-200-firefighters-made-more-than-200000-last-year-by-amassing-thousands-of-hours-of-overtime/

Last year, 180 Seattle Fire Department employees—almost one in five—made more than $200,000, doubling or tripling their salaries by working large, and sometimes mind-boggling, amounts of overtime.

Of those, 19 (20 if you count Fire Chief Harold Scoggins) made more than $300,000, with several reporting salaries close to $400,000—a level that puts them in the ranks of Seattle Police Department officers like Ron Willis, who was recently suspended for working excess overtime after making almost $400,000 last year.

PubliCola obtained Fire employees’ pay information, including a breakdown that accounts for vacation, leave, overtime, and other pay codes, through a records request.

Most of the SFD employees who made over $300,000 reported working thousands of hours of overtime, on top of the 90.46 hours they get paid for every two weeks.

The highest-paid SFD employee was Captain James Hilliard, a 32-year veteran who added $180,000 to his $120,000 salary by working 2,335 hours of overtime, reporting more than 200 hours of overtime in each of five different months in 2024. Another captain, Michael Frediani, more than tripled his $105,000 salary—to $384,000—by clocking in for 1,726 hours of overtime, including 252 in December alone.

But it wasn’t just higher-ranking firefighters who cleared the $300,000 bar.

Under their union contract, Seattle firefighters automatically get paid for about 2,350 hours in a year, including vacation, sick time, merit pay, holidays, and other time off. Many Seattle firefighters in the top income bracket were paid for 4,000, 5,000, or even 6,000 hours, most of that in overtime.

Firefighter Daniel Kieta, whose base salary in 2024 was $95,000, more than tripled his pay to $315,000, receiving pay for 6,000 hours on the clock last year, including almost 2,400 hours of overtime. That works out, on average, to 45 hours of overtime for each 45-hour week. But it wasn’t distributed evenly. Last June, for example, Kieta reported working 267 hours at regular pay and 283 hours of overtime, for an average of 128 hours a week, more than 65 hours a week of that in overtime.

Darren Schulberg, a firefighter since 1991, reported working 5,730 hours in 2024, including 2,405 hours of overtime; those hours helped boost his annual pay from $86,635 to $322,775. In June, Schulberg added 259 hours of overtime to 254 hours at regular pay, for a an average of 120 hours a week.

And Jason Lynch, a firefighter with a base salary of $97,000, made an additional $238,000 in overtime, including 441 overtime hours in December. All told, Lynch reported working 688 hours in December, for a average of 155 hours a week that month. (There are 168 hours in a week).

Firefighters can take rest breaks during long shifts, so these extraordinary hours include some down time for sleep. PubliCola has asked SFD if there are any other factors that would account for firefighters working 120-, 130, or 150-hour weeks.

These are far from the only Seattle firefighters who reported working more than 5,000 hours last year; in the $200,000 to $300,000 range, at least 30 firefighters said they worked between 4,002 and 5,278 hours.

SFD did not respond to a request to make firefighters at the top end of the overtime range available to talk about what their shifts are like.

In 2022, the Seattle Times ran a piece about firefighters working record overtime hours the previous year—claiming that firefighters like Kieta were “forced” to work thousands of extra hours because “unprecedented staffing shortages.” At the time, the department had 1,026 firefighters, about 50 fewer than it does today. Fire department spokesperson Kristin Hanson said the department is still facing a shortage, as more officers retire and recruitment lags. Currently, she said, 130 firefighter positions are vacant, after 232 retirements between 2020 and 2024.

But that doesn’t entirely account for employees like Kieta, who the Seattle Times highlighted as the top member of what the paper called the “4,000-hour club”—firefighters who were paid for working more than 4,000 hours in a year.

While staffing shortages explain the need for overtime, they don’t explain why it’s distributed so unevenly. Nor is it clear how supervisors, or firefighters themselves, determine when excessive work hours start to affect a firefighter’s ability to do their job, including responding to emergencies.

Unlike many other city employees, firefighters can volunteer for virtually unlimited overtime. Their union contract allows them to work 60 hours in a row, take 12 hours off, and then do it again. Working that schedule, a firefighter could amass 144 hours in a week. We’ve asked SFD to help us understand how some firefighters appear to have worked more than that, and will update this post when we hear back.

Beyond those minimal requirements, he only real limit on a firefighter’s ability to work nonstop is their own level of fatigue: Emergency responders need to be alert, and a tired firefighter, like a tired cop, could be prone to making critical (and potentially fatal) mistakes.

But the only person who determines whether a firefighter is too fatigued to work is the firefighter himself. According to the firefighters’ contract, “Members are responsible for monitoring their state of readiness. When a member’s scheduled shift falls on the second consecutive shift and the member is not adequately rested to perform their duties, the member will inform his or her supervisor and request time off using sick leave, merits or other personal compensatory time.”

If a firefighter decides they can work 144 hours in a week,  in other words, that’s up to them. And hiring more firefighters, which SFD has been doing, clearly isn’t going to stop people from trying to amass as much overtime as possible.

There’s another potential motivation, beyond earning more money in any given year, for firefighters to try to boost their pay. The size of a firefighter’s pensions most of which are managed and funded through a state system called LEOFF, is determined by their five top-paying years—a powerful incentive to boost their “high five” numbers, especially they approach the end of their careers.

The city’s spending on the fire department has increased in recent years, although Hanson says the extra overtime is balanced out by the money the department saves by not being fully staffed.