Overtime smokescreen

Taxpayers are still waiting for a towel after being hosed down by the Clark County Fire Department for years on end. Instead, they’re getting a smokescreen.

Any day now, Clark County officials are expected to release an Applied Analysis study of department staffing and overtime. And its primary conclusion is hardly a jaw-dropper, according to the Review-Journal’s Kristi Jourdan: Paying overtime costs taxpayers less than hiring more firefighters.

Anyone who manages a payroll can vouch for that. Because the Fire Department provides pension, health care and paid leave benefits worth almost as much as an employee’s salary, bringing on more staff is indeed prohibitively expensive. But steep, unanticipated overtime costs can blow up a budget.

So to further reduce unbudgeted firefighter overtime, the county’s only choice is to spend even more to hire additional emergency responders?

“It’s all on the county,” said Ryan Beaman, president of the county firefighters’ union. “We shouldn’t get blamed for it as the union. … We’ve always said if you want to reduce overtime, hire more people.”

But the Fire Department’s overtime costs do not run millions of dollars a year because stations are constantly undermanned. Overtime is a problem because firefighters have gamed the system to line their pockets through schedule rigging, sick-leave abuse, disability schemes and pension spiking. The firefighters’ generous contract mandates that they receive overtime pay to fill in for colleagues on leave. And they get more paid leave than they’ll ever need, accruing and cashing out what they don’t use at retirement.

The solution is not to hire more firefighters — not when Las Vegas police and the FBI are still trying to determine whether the department’s more-for-us culture was criminal. To cut overtime even more — it has fallen from $18 million in 2008 to $10 million last year — why not negotiate to replace 24-hour shifts with 12-hour days and reduce the amount of paid leave firefighters receive? Why not put in place more safeguards and oversight to prevent excessive overtime?

Firefighters do indeed have important jobs. And they’re paid very well for them. The typical county firefighter receives $175,000 per year in total compensation and collects a six-figure annual pension benefit after just 25 years of service.

On a daily basis, firefighters enter homes and businesses to help the sick, injured and dying. They see wallets and walk past valuables without once thinking about stuffing them inside their jackets. But back at the station, too many of these same firefighters have had no problem reaching into those same wallets to wrongly boost their paychecks.

County officials have paid for the wrong study. To get a handle on firefighter overtime, they should hire a forensic accountant.