Part 2 – Recent Salary Increases to the Firefighters
By the No on Measure Q Campaign
Introduction
We recently reported that the City of Davis used flawed and misleading data to award excessive compensation increase to the City Manger. (See https://newdavisite.wordpress.com/2024/10/27/the-city-council-used-misleading-comparisons-of-compensation-from-other-cities-to-award-excessive-sa/). They did so by using compensation data from 12 regional cities against which to compare the Davis City Manager's compensation. Claiming this data showed our City Manager was under-compensated, in July of 2024 the Davis City Council awarded him a 2% annual salary increase retroactive to January 1 of this year, an annual 3.0% bonus retroactive for 2023 and another 3% bonus for the uncompleted 2024 year.
However, in that article we showed that if the comparative compensation data from only 6 regional cities of comparable size were otherwise used, our City Manager earned between 3% and 30% greater than the City Managers of any of those six comparable-sized cities in 2023 – and this was before the Council awarded bonuses to our City Manager for both 2023 and 2024.
In May, 2024 the Davis City Council similarly approved a 6.0% increase in base salary for all firefighters retroactive to July 1, 2023. The ostensible reason given for the salary increase was that the total compensation for the average Firefighter II position was 6.0% LESS than the median total compensation earned by Firefighter II-equivalent positions in twelve regional cities and fire protection agencies; and thus a raise to ALL firefighters was appropriate to keep their compensation competitive. However, the Council again based their analysis on misleading data.
Unfortunately, similar to the comparative analysis of compensation of our City Manager, the Davis Firefighter II compensation was also compared to that in ten purportedly “comparable” local cities and two fire protection agencies in the region. However, many of those ten cities are much larger than Davis, and include Sacramento (population of 525,000), Roseville (population 190,000), and Fairfield (population 119, 000). Davis’ population is only about 67,000.
An Alternative Fair Comparison with Comparable-Sized Cities
Davisite 