Leaders of the Los Angeles Fire Department’s labor union said for a long time that the department did not have enough money to keep the city safe, long before the terrible fire in Pacific Palisades.
“It’s a damn shame,” Escobar said at a city Fire Commission meeting in February, “that it took this incident, the Pacific Palisades, to finally bring attention to our grossly understaffed and underfunded Fire Department.” Escobar is president of the United Firefighters of Los Angeles City.
Union leaders and top LAFD officers said that budget cuts had left them with too many engines that needed repairs and not enough mechanics to do them. But even though they were against the pay cuts, the union leaders were able to negotiate with Mayor Karen Bass to give the city’s 3,300 firemen four years of pay raises. Of course, firemen make a lot more than their base pay. In fact, overtime costs the LAFD about 30% of their payroll.
A Times investigation found that Escobar and other top union officers have been getting extra pay by working overtime for years while also getting a five- to six-figure union salary.
According to records from 2022, Escobar made about $540,000 that year. This is the most recent year for which both his city and union pay can be found. Overtime pay more than doubled his base salary of $184,034 that year. In total, he made more than $424,500 from the city in pay and bonuses, according to payroll records.
According to the union’s most recent federal tax return, he got an extra $115,962 from them. He said he worked 48 hours a week on union and related tasks, but city records from that year show that he worked an extra 30 hours on average each week, for a total of 78 hours of work each week.
After The Times asked about it, the LAFD said this week that it has started a “comprehensive review and overhaul” of how it keeps track of hours and pays people who are on union leave.
“The Department has recognized the need for significant improvements to its accounting and timekeeping processes related to union release time,” said the agency.
The overtime news comes at a time when the union, UFLAC, is being closely watched by its parent group over how much it spends. The International Association of Fire Fighters, which is based in Washington, D.C. and is in charge of all local firefighter unions across the country, is looking into UFLAC’s funds in a wide range of areas, such as how officers use union credit cards.
The LAFD has had a problem with high overtime costs for a long time. Their around-the-clock staffing model rests on a lot of people working extra shifts. Many firemen like that they can make more money by working extra hours at a higher rate. This is because firefighters usually work about 10 24-hour shifts a month, not counting overtime. But over the years, the LAFD’s reliance on overtime has raised worries about fatigue, burnout, and how well taxpayer money is being spent.
For a long time, union leaders have told the city that it needs to hire more firemen to cut down on time worked.
A Bass spokesman, Zach Seidl, said that the fire chief decides who works extra and that the LAFD got $13.6 million this fiscal year to train three new classes of recruits. Seidl said that the LAFD union’s main goal in contract talks was to get pay raises, but Bass also got $51 million for 10 fire trucks, 5 fire engines, 20 ambulances, and other tools. Bass’s proposed budget for 2025–26 includes 227 new jobs for the LAFD, about half of which are firemen and the other half are emergency medical technicians and mechanics. Other city departments will have to lay off workers because the budget is short by almost $1 billion.
A database from the city’s payroll office shows that firefighters and fire chiefs made an average of $140,100 a year in base pay and an extra $73,500 in overtime last year.
Marc Bashoor, who used to be the head of the Prince George’s County Fire/EMS Department in Maryland and now teaches leadership to firefighters all over the country, said that job openings create more job openings because “everyone gets mentally and physically tired of working.”
“It turns into this loud cycle.” “People get sick and tired of working, so they call in sick,” Bashoor said. “Extra time leads to more overtime.”
The union’s deal with the city says that some of its 10 board members can take full-time leaves from their jobs with the LAFD while still getting paid. The LAFD said that the board members who are on leave can work extra jobs on nights, weekends, or holidays, on top of their 40-hour wage, and will be paid 1.5 times their hourly rate. That’s how Escobar’s job as union president works. He’s had that job since 2018.
In 2022, Escobar worked the most hours and got the most money from the union. According to city and tax records, he also made the most money from extra. His records show that from 2018 to 2024, he made a total of $738,439 in extra pay. The LAFD said that vacation time that is cashed out is part of extra pay.