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Long before the devastating fire in Pacific Palisades, leaders of the Los Angeles Fire Department’s labor union complained that the agency did not have enough money to keep the city safe.“It’s a damn shame, and excuse my language, that it took this incident, the Pacific Palisades, to finally bring attention to our grossly understaffed, underfunded Fire Department,” Freddy Escobar, president of the United Firefighters of Los Angeles City, said at a city Fire Commission meeting in February.Union leaders, along with top LAFD commanders, said budget cuts had resulted in a backlog of engines needing repairs and not enough mechanics to fix them.But even as they denounced those reductions, the union leaders secured four years of pay raises for the city’s 3,300 firefighters through negotiations with Mayor Karen Bass.
And firefighters often make much more than their base pay, with about 30% of the LAFD’s payroll costs going to overtime.That includes Escobar and other top union officers, who have for years been padding their paychecks with overtime while also collecting a five- to six-figure union stipend, a Times investigation found.Escobar made about $540,000 in 2022, the most recent year for which records of both his city and union earnings are available.
He more than doubled his base salary of $184,034 with overtime payouts that year, earning a total of more than $424,500 from the city in pay and benefits, payroll data show.He collected an additional $115,962 stipend from the union, according to its most recent federal tax filing.
He reported working 48 hours a week on union and related duties, while records provided by the city for that year show he picked up an average of roughly 30 hours of overtime a week — a total of about 78 hours of work each week.After inquiries from The Times, the LAFD said this week that it has launched a “comprehensive review and overhaul” of its procedures for tracking the hours and reimbursement of those on leave for the...