City Pay Wars

The city of Cedar Park just escalated the pay war for firefighters in central Texas. This is the game the cities play to increase the pay of city employees.

Every several years each city does a pay survey of similar cities in Texas to see how their pay compares with other cities. This invariably leads to a pay increase for the employees without respect to the scope of the job. In other words, a firefighters job has changed very little over the last several decades, yet the pay has increased due to the game of pay setting that cities engage in.

Cedar Park has raised the pay of firefighters by about 15% over the next three years. Currently, a firefighter with 5 years experience earns $53,294 annually. A 15% raise will boost that to $61,342 by 2019.

It looks like Georgetown is one of the leaders in the pay setting race.  They raised firefighters pay 4% in January, 2106 with another raise scheduled for July, 2017. Here is the Georgetown firefighter pay table. Click on table to enlarge.

So currently a Georgetown firefighter with 5 years experience earns $54,368/year and next July that will escalate to $56,542/year. Thus a Georgetown firefighter is ahead of a Cedar Park firefighter right now, but, without additional raises by 2019, they will be behind Cedar Park by $5,000/year.

It seems obvious that a new system of setting police and firefighter pay is needed to replace the round robin system that results in one-ups-man-ship for the pay tables. Keep in mind that it costs the city $50,000 to $80,000 to hire, equip and train a new firefighter. If they leave within 1-3 years, that is money that is mostly wasted.