I spent this week talking to firefighters, driving around Southern California with firefighters and watching firefighters fight blazes that have devastated thousands of lives in Southern California.

Nobody who has done that can doubt why firefighters deserve the respect society offers them.

But part of my job is going to involve making firefighters unhappy with me. Actually “unhappy” may be a mild word.

In 2002 The Californian printed a series of stories by former reporter Davin McHenry describing the overtime pay firefighters can earn under Kern County Fire Department’s pay policies.

Firefighters held press conferences and cancelled subscriptions to protest the publication.

In 2003 McHenry wrote another series of stories about the issue and interviewed firefighters who shared their stories and described the toll their work had on their lives.

McHenry told me he didn’t get any complaints after that story.

Now it’s my job to investigate the issue again.

I’ve already gotten e-mails from wives and mothers of firefighters asking me how I dare to question the service firefighters provide. They earn their pay. How would I like it if my house burned and a firefighter didn’t show up?

I’m not going to tell those mothers and wives what they should think — or that they shouldn’t stand by their sons and husbands.

But I will say this:

These stories aren’t about tearing down firefighters. These stories are about holding government accountable for how it spends the money we all pay in taxes — and investigating if overtime pay is the best way to staff a fire department.

A Kern County fire engineer was the 45th highest paid county employee in the last 12 months. He made just under $197,000 — more than the county’s top lawyers, a raft of doctors from Kern Medical Center, the County Administrative Officer and every single one of his bosses at the fire department.

To do that, my rough calculations show he had to work around 2,300 hours of overtime — not including the 2,080 regular hours in a typical work year. That adds up to 4,400 hours over 12 months — leaving only 1,800 hours for himself and for his family.

As Kern County Fire Chief Dennis Thompson mentioned to me, when I first got the pay numbers that allowed me to do those calculations, numbers don’t tell the whole story.

He’s right.

But right now all I have are the numbers.

So today I put in a round of calls to some of the top paid firefighters in Kern County.

I asked them to call me and tell me what overtime pay means to them and their families — and what it costs them physically, mentally and emotionally to earn that money.

I am asking firefighters, in this blog, to call me at 395-7415 and share their stories with me.

You don’t have to like me. But this isn’t about me. It’s about getting the whole story.

James Burger
Californian staff writer

I must apologize to City of Bakersfield fire engineer Scott Newell.

I made him miss Katie Couric.

The CBS Evening News anchor rolled into the neighborhood Newell's strike team was defending from the Harris fire just after noon on Wednesday — just as Newell was telling me about the teams' battle against the Southern California blazes.

Newell, who is a talented story teller by the way, told me today that he only registered Couric as a female presence in yellow fire gear. He must have really been into telling that story.

Couric apparently talked to some Kern County firefighters before being whisked off to the next story.

And when Newell hung up on his cell phone conversation with me, he said, all the guys on the strike team were bubbling about Couric.

It was the highlight of the day, he said.

Couric's visit may have spurred the crew to new firefighting heights. They "pitched a no-hitter" and protected a bunch of homes from the fire, Newell said.

And I got the chance to tell a lot of people at home how our local firefighters are chipping in.

But I still feel bad about making Newell miss Katie.

James

Both the County of Kern and the Service Employees International Union say they've locked in acceptable contract language that will finalize the deal made in exhaustive negoitations this year.

Here are some of the details:
• New employees get a mixed retirement benefit  — up to 1.62 percent of their salary in retirement for each year they worked for the county, plus a 401(k)-style investment plan with up to a six percent county match.
• The switch from that percentage-based retirement to a "hybrid" system is supposed to help the county save a small amount of money in the near future. But, as a best guess, between now and 2027 it is supposed to save the county a total of $547 million.
• All of the 5,700 SEIU member jobs get at least a four percent raise immediately and some job classifications get up to a 38.5 percent raise to bring their pay in line with the median pay for the job in other counties.
• all jobs get four percent raises in each of the next two years.

Union members have been waiting on their raises for more than a month.

They should get them by the end of next month, county and union leaders said on Thursday.

What do people think of the deal?

James