Twelve San Diego Fire‑Rescue employees took home more than $200,000 each in overtime last year, according to city payroll figures obtained by local reporters. Those hefty checks helped drive the department’s overtime costs toward roughly $62.4 million in 2025, even as the city wrestles with a widening budget gap. The numbers have stoked fresh debate at City Hall about staffing, hiring and how to keep engines and medic units fully covered without hollowing out other services.
Deputy Fire Marshal Eric Dunnick earned $264,037 in overtime in 2025, nearly four and a half times his roughly $59,337 base salary, and has taken home nearly $1.2 million in overtime since 2021, according to reporting by Times of San Diego. Dunnick was one of the 12 Fire‑Rescue employees on the list, which also included several captains, battalion chiefs and a fire engineer. The outlet’s review found that many of the top earners collected far more from overtime than from their regular pay.
Those eyebrow‑raising individual totals show up plainly in the city’s official payroll filing. The City of San Diego’s 2025 Employee Compensation Report itemizes overtime by worker and shows Fire‑Rescue among the largest overtime spenders citywide. Reporters pulled overtime rankings and totals straight from those public payroll files. The spreadsheets make clear that the department’s overtime burden has climbed in recent years as staffing levels and pay structures have shifted the math of keeping emergency coverage intact around the clock.
Audit: Staffing And Budgeting Gaps
A May 2025 performance audit by the Independent City Auditor found that Fire‑Rescue consistently underestimated attrition and overestimated academy graduates, a combination that creates a staffing imbalance and drives up overtime. The audit reported that vacancies and leave accounted for an average of about 83% of the department’s overtime overages from FY2022 through FY2024 and recommended that Fire‑Rescue formalize how it budgets for overtime. Among its suggested fixes, the auditor urged the city to update relief‑pool calculations and more accurately project how many academies are needed to reach full staffing.
Fire‑Rescue: Overtime Fills The Gaps And Funds Deployments
In a statement to Times of San Diego, Fire‑Rescue spokesperson Candace Hadley said overtime is used to cover leave, vacancies, deployments, mandatory training and specialized operations, and that negotiated wage increases have pushed overtime rates higher. Hadley also noted that the department typically receives about $5.6 million a year in reimbursements when personnel deploy on strike teams or other mutual‑aid incidents, which offsets some overtime spending. Budget Tradeoffs
The city’s FY2025 third‑quarter budget monitoring report identifies overtime as a major driver of personnel overages and projects that overtime will overshoot the budget by about $34.4 million this fiscal year, with roughly 77% of that gap tied to Fire‑Rescue and Police. Those overruns, paired with softer revenue projections, have widened the city’s expected shortfall and prompted mitigation steps such as hiring freezes and service adjustments. That backdrop helps explain why payroll tables showing seven‑figure overtime totals for top earners are now getting extra scrutiny in budget hearings at City Hall.
The auditor’s proposed remedies, including holding more academies each year to speed hiring, documenting overtime budgeting and creating a relief pool, are designed to reduce dependence on repeated overtime but would take time and upfront investment to roll out. Fire‑Rescue managers and labor leaders caution that blunt cuts to overtime without additional hiring could leave engines and medic units short‑staffed. For now the city is trying to balance immediate staffing needs with longer‑term plans to ease the payroll pressure created by heavy overtime use.
Local reporting and watchdog analyses indicate that San Diego’s situation reflects a broader pattern in which public‑safety staffing gaps and negotiated pay increases drive oversized overtime bills in multiple departments. For more background on how overtime has reshaped compensation in San Diego, see KPBS’s recent analysis of city employee pay and overtime.
