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Fire captain tops highest paid list
by John Tawa
A Manhattan Beach firefighter was the highest paid city employee in calendar year 1999, according to figures released by Donna Peter, the city's Director of Personnel.
Fire Marshal and Captain Barry Bagley earned more than $152,000 in salary and benefits, including almost $66,000 in overtime pay, to claim the top spot. His compensation was more than $17,000 higher than City Manager Geoff Dolan, Manhattan Beach's second highest paid employee.
Five other firefighters joined Bagley among the city's top 10 highest paid employees. Fire Chief Dennis Groat, who was the seventh highest compensated person in the city but the sixth best paid in his department, said two principal reasons contributed to his charges being the most highly compensated.
The first reason is the 31-person department's minimum staffing requirements. Only the bare minimum number of firefighters are hired to staff the city's two fire stations, Groat said. Whenever a firefighter goes on vacation or is sick or injured, another firefighter must take his place. That firefighter gets overtime pay for his extra effort.
"If this was a salary schedule of base pay, then you perhaps wouldn't see a lot of firefighters on the list," Groat said. "What these figures represent is a person's base pay, plus a portion of another position that they're working. There's a lot of extra hours that these people put in to end up with the total compensation in that amount."
Groat said the city looked into hiring more firefighters to avoid paying so much overtime, but the analysis concluded that no significant savings would be achieved.
"(Hiring) brings down overtime cost dramatically, but net costs are way up because they're also here when they're not needed," he explained.
A second reason for all the overtime, Groat said, is that days lost to injury by his employees in 1999 were higher than average.
"In most businesses, if someone is off injured, you run without them," Groat said. "In this business, because of our minimum staffing, we have to fill that position."
Groat added that while the overtime budget was exceeded in 1999, salary savings because of periods when there were firefighter openings helped offset the overtime costs.
"In terms of our total budget, we were within budget last year," he said.
Only two city staff members made the top 10, led by Dolan at $135,012.91. Two police officers, topped by traffic Sgt. Andy Harrod, also made the list.
"We've been operating with two sergeant vacancies in patrol," explained Police Captain Dave Maggard. "That obviously creates a significant amount of overtime for other sergeants."
Seven of the city's top 10 wage earners also topped the list last year. Only Fire Battalion Chief Ken Shuck, Police Lt. Bruce Powell and Harrod are new to the list.
Last year's top 10 employees earned $1.145 million. This year's top 10 made $1.237 million, an increase of 8 per cent. Bagley made $25,000 more than last year's top earner, but the Number 10 wage earner stayed fairly steady, $106,000 in 1998 compared to $109,000 in 1999.
The city had 260 full-time and 150 part-time employees in 1999. Total payroll and special pay was $15.55 million. The top 10 received $1.24 million, or 8 per cent of the total payroll. ER