Some S.F. workers earn $300,000-plus thanks to OT

Image 1 of / 9 Caption Close Some S.F. workers earn $300,000-plus thanks to OT 1 / 9 Back to Gallery

Thanks to ample overtime - especially at the Fire Department - more than 700 San Francisco city workers took home wages in excess of $200,000 last year.

That included 20 who collected more than $300,000 apiece.

The city's best-paid worker in 2013 was Fire Department Battalion Chief Samson Lai, who made a total of $347,102 - thanks to $131,000 in overtime and $29,000 in premium pay and other incentives.

Lai, who works at Station 2 at Powell and Broadway, earned more than his own boss, Fire Chief Joanne Hayes-White ($336,922). He also came out ahead of the city's top-paid department leader, Police Chief Greg Suhr ($339,282).

"I'm probably in the busiest battalion west of the Mississippi," said Lai, 51, who oversees a crew of 50 firefighters and says he earned every dime of his overtime and premium pay.

In all, Fire Department brass and rank and file accounted for 62 of the city's 100 highest-paid workers last year. All of them made more than $250,000.

"This is the ugly side of a hiring freeze," said Tom O'Connor, president of the firefighters union. "You are paying someone else at time and a half to get the job done."

Fire Department overtime rocketed to $43.8 million last fiscal year, up from $9.9 million a decade earlier. A city controller's audit attributed the increase to "deliberate department decisions" to use overtime to make up for being short 257 firefighters.

The $43.8 million overtime bill sounds steep, but the audit found it was cheaper than hiring new firefighters.

Firefighters at the top pay grade cost the city about $78 an hour, including benefits. Overtime costs $68 an hour.

The Fire Department did impose a 620-hour annual cap on overtime a few years ago. But there's a loophole that allows firefighters such as Lai to break the cap voluntarily and put in as much as 1,100 hours of OT a year if it keeps others from having to work mandatory overtime.

The Fire Department isn't the only agency getting by on extra hours. The city's top overtime earner last year was in the Sheriff's Department, where $95,000-a-year Deputy Whitney Yee earned an eye-bulging $196,689 in OT.

Add in nearly $17,000 in other pay, and it brought Yee's total pay for the year to $308,434.

Incidentally, 11,361 workers - or nearly a quarter of the city's full-time workforce - made more than $100,000 last year.

As for Mayor Ed Lee, he ranked only 37th on the city's earnings list, at $285,466.

But then, he doesn't get overtime.

Cleanup: In the aftermath of recent legislative scandals, Democrats have unveiled what they're billing as the most significant reforms on lobbying that Sacramento has seen in decades.

A package of bills proposed by state Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, and other Democrats would ban campaign fundraising in lobbyists' homes, limit gifts to lawmakers to $200 apiece and end the practice of handing out free concert and sports tickets to legislators.

On the other hand, lobbyists could still hold fundraisers in restaurants or anywhere else. And while they wouldn't be able to give out free tickets, they could still dole out the millions of dollars in campaign contributions that are the lifeblood of legislative elections.

"Let's be honest about it," Steinberg said. "So long as we have a private system of campaign finances, the best you can do is make the rules the most transparent that you can."

State Sen. Jerry Hill, D-San Mateo, would take the cleanup a step further with a bill that would prohibit elected officials from contributing campaign funds to nonprofits operated by other elected officials or their own family members.

Hill would also limit legislators' junkets to $5,000 per year.

It will be interesting to see how far he gets.

And finally: There's been a string of assaults on women near San Francisco General Hospital in recent days - all of them committed by a man in a wheelchair.

According to a sheriff's bulletin, the attacker - described as a man in his 40s - "propels himself backward with his working leg and is capable of moving at a high rate of speed." He has punched or slapped four women.

We're told San Francisco police arrested a suspect after he allegedly shoplifted a $2.49 mini-bottle of Tequila on Wednesday. Problem was, they didn't realize at the time that he might be linked to the assaults, and by the time they did, he was freed without charge and was back on the streets.

Now they're looking for him again.

The suspect, Guerrero Anderson, who uses several aliases, is on felony probation for another theft, said district attorney's spokesman Alex Bastian. Prosecutors tried unsuccessfully to have his probation revoked in January after he was convicted of two misdemeanor sexual batteries, including butt-slapping a pregnant woman.

"Had the judge (former Supervisor Gerardo Sandoval) sentenced him to the aggravated term we asked for of three years in prison," said Bastian, "we wouldn't be talking about this today."