Sean C. Morgan
The highest levels of overtime wages among Sweet Home-area public employees last year went to a Sweet Home Fire and Ambulance District employee, who made $21,500 on top of an $81,600 administrative salary, according to an analysis by The New Era.
Recently, a reader dropped by this newspaper with a news clipping from the Los Angeles Times about overtime in the city of Los Angeles, where a firefighter banked $360,000 in overtime alone in a single year. She wondered whether that sort of overtime was occurring in Sweet Home. The reader also complained that the Sweet Home Fire and Ambulance District gave away a fire engine.
The New Era checked into her questions, with the fire department and the city. Official audits have not been completed yet for the 2018-19 fiscal year, but the two organizations had unaudited information available.
For administration, which includes three battalion chiefs, the fire chief and an administrative assistant, the SHFAD budgeted $28,000 in overtime, said Fire Chief Dave Barringer. The department spent $47,000 more, for a total of $75,000 in overtime – an average of $15,000 per employee in overtime. The over-expenditure was directly tied to overtime paid to firefighters for responding to wildland fires in Oregon and California last year. The district is able to pay for the over-expenditure through reimbursements by the state governments for employees and apparatus used by the department.
Similar to the administration, the SHFAD budgeted $53,000 for overtime for firefighter-paramedics. The group includes eight full-time firefighter-paramedics and 10 part-time medics. The district spent $136,000 in overtime on the group, an average of $7,500 per employee.
Firefighters are paid continuously while responding to wildland fires and begin collecting overtime pay after they’ve been on the scene for 40 hours.
“When we send people every year, we send them away from their families,” Barringer said.
While he does not receive overtime pay when on duty in the district, he does receive overtime when he responds to a conflagration.
Normally, he does not respond to conflagrations, the chief said, but last year he spent 14 days on wildland firefighting last year.
Sweet Home responded to one conflagration this year, Barringer said, and he expects overtime to come in under budget with the lack of wildland fires that occurred in 2019.
The top overtime earner in the district received $21,500. Of that total, $16,500 was for conflagration overtime with $5,000 in regular overtime.
The second-largest overtime income was $15,500, all of it for conflagrations, for an employee earning $88,000 in regular pay. The third-largest overtime income was a total of $13,000, which included $9,000 for conflagrations and $4,000 for regular duty on a base salary of $61,600 per year.
The top three overtime earners with the City of Sweet Home were Police Department employees. The largest overtime wage was $13,000 for 2018-19, for 268.25 hours.
The second-largest overtime wage was $7,000 for 152 hours. The third-largest overtime wage was $6,700 for 160 hours.
The Police Department paid $75,000 for 1,708 hours of Police Department overtime, said Finance Director Brandon Neish, an average overtime wage of $3,400 per employee.
Police Chief Jeff Lynn said the department uses overtime on major cases, such as murder.
Sweet Home police investigated one murder in 2018-19.
Fire Engine
The SHFAD Board of Directors, which is independent of the City of Sweet Home, recently agreed to donate a 1991 Pierce Type 1 fire engine to the small East Lincoln County Fire District, which includes communities like Eddyville.
Barringer said the truck was listed for sale for a minimum of $4,000, but failed to sell.
The engine was purchased when Barringer was a brand new firefighter, he said. The department has kept it in good condition and attempted to sell it, but no one was interested in it.
The engine is below National Fire Protection Association standards, which affects local insurance ratings, Barringer said. The fire district does sell surplus equipment, but this is one it could not sell.
“They need it because they’re going to use it,” Barringer said. Small departments are often just groups of volunteers who can use anything they can get.
The district also donated old air packs, which are no longer NFPA-compliant, to Halsey, which has just two paid employees, Barringer said, noting that Halsey responds on mutual aid calls to the Sweet Home district, which ends between Crawfordsville and Brownsville.
“It’s one of those things we do to get along with our neighbors,” Barringer said. Lebanon has a higher tax rate, and a larger property base to tax, and it often does the same thing for Sweet Home.
Sweet Home also benefits from donations, Barringer said. He just received nozzles and two intakes donated by the Lebanon Fire District, and the Mohawk Valley Rural Fire District donated the box mounted to the Sweet Home district’s new rescue response vehicle chassis, which was among vehicles covered by the current $1.575 million bond.
Also, as part of the bond, the district mounted a new tender tank to a truck chassis it purchased from the federal government for $1,200, Barringer said.
Sweet Home is efficient when it purchases equipment, Barringer said, but when safety standards are an issue, “I will buy it.”