City Manager denies OT pay for firefighters on fire scene due to lack of preapproval

Firefighters from the town of Brewnall are upset over the fact they will not be paid for multiple hours of overtime. The issue stems from a new city policy that states all overtime must be approved by the City Manager before the overtime occurs.

Strip Mall Fire

No OT Pay for this fire

The overtime in question is the result of a major fire that crews were dispatched to shortly before shift change. Brewnall fire works 24 hours shifts that start, and end, at 7am. The morning of January 5, 2014 at about 6:15am firefighters were sent to a fire at local strip mall.

Upon initial arrival smoke and flames were showing from a pizza joint located in the middle of the row of six stores. Soon though firefighters found that the fire had extended into the adjacent businesses also. Before the fire was put out four of the six businesses would be damaged by flame.

When the next shift came on duty all of them responded out to the scene. Mutual aid was called for an extra engine. Because two different shifts from Brewnall were on scene, the incident commander decided not to send out a second mutual aid request for manpower.

The firefighters who went into overtime were on scene till just after 12 noon. So they were expecting to get five hours of overtime. Today a memo came out of city hall saying the City manager would be denying that overtime request.

“We are in a difficult budgetary time and I need to make hard decisions that affect our cities budget. In November of 2013 a memo was sent to all department heads stating that effective Jan 1, 2014 no city employee may take overtime without prior approval of the City Manager. The firemen at this scene made no attempt to contact my office before they went into overtime. As per city policy the five hours each of these employees put in for will be denied.”

The fire chief is furious.

“How can we get prior approval for an emergency. It is not like this fire was scheduled three days in advance. It started that morning and we took care if it that morning. Not like we can let it burn till we get permission, business owners and insurance companies tend to frown on that…”

The City Manager was willing to answer some of our questions. We asked him to clarify how prior approval is possible in an emergency.

“First off, when the new shift came on, the other guys could have gone home. If the fire was too big for the crew working on normal time, then call mutual aid. We send our firefighters to the neighbors all the time. It is about time they send some our way for a call.

When pressed for an answer to our question about approval in an emergency the City Manager gave us this smug answer.

“I know for a fact every person who claimed OT has a cell phone. Did any of them try to call me at home? I also know the city paid big bucks to install laptops in all the fire engines and command SUVs. Did anyone try to send me an email? Now before you say ‘maybe they were too busy fighting the fire’, let me point out that they all have them fancy portable radios. Did anyone think to take two seconds to radio a dispatcher and ask dispatch to call me for approval? The answer is NO. Not one person on that scene made an attempt to follow the policy. To these firefighter it might not seem fair, but trust me, to the taxpayers this is very fair. No… correct that… for the tax payers this is the RIGHT thing for me to do.”

Union officials assured us that grievances would be filed.

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The staff at the CallTheCops are all people who now or at one time did work as police, firefighters, in EMS and even dispatch.