By Ethan Varian
Bay Area News Group
SAN JOSE, Calif. — San Jose’s highest-paid city employee isn’t the mayor or police chief. It’s a firefighter who’s collected more than $1 million in overtime pay over the past three years.
According to city data, fire engineer Spencer Piercy earned $437,337 in overtime in 2025, more than twice his base pay and nearly double Mayor Matt Mahan’s salary. That followed overtime earnings of more than $411,000 in 2024 and $287,000 in 2023.
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Piercy is one of almost 400 city fire and police department employees who earned six-figure overtime sums last year, more than triple the number in 2020, according to the data. The surge in overtime pay comes as the city faces a $50 million annual budget deficit, which officials have proposed closing through a range of cuts, including delaying a planned fire station in Little Saigon.
Public safety overtime has become a growing issue for cities across the country grappling with staffing shortages and increasing service demands. In the Bay Area, fire and police departments in San Jose, Oakland and San Francisco have blown past their overtime budgets by tens of millions of dollars in recent years.
Last year, for example, San Jose spent $71 million on police overtime — going $45 million over budget. A significant portion of that overage, however, was offset by savings from vacant positions, putting the police department’s total employee compensation costs $16.5 million above budget.
San Jose officials said Piercy earned his overtime pay by filling vacant shifts on the fire department’s paramedic, hazardous incident and fire engineer teams, which maintain and operate firefighting equipment, among other duties. The department has faced a severe shortage of licensed paramedics since the COVID-19 pandemic and has relied on other qualified employees such as Piercy to support paramedic teams and maintain staffing levels, officials said.
The city did not say whether Piercy’s overtime was subject to annual caps or how many hours he worked. Piercy did not respond to interview requests about his overtime pay.
City officials said that while overtime — which generally pays at a higher rate than regular wages — is not the goal, it remains a crucial tool for ensuring the safety of local communities.
“Emergency response and public safety would suffer if overtime slots for minimum staffing levels or other critical services went unfilled,” the city said in a statement.
Even so, officials have undertaken a multi-year effort to rein in overtime spending, including controls outlined in the city’s latest budget proposal, which the San Jose City Council is set to vote on Tuesday.
The reforms include redeploying police staff from specialized units to field patrols, lowering the cap on paid time off officers receive for working overtime and requiring additional approvals for certain types of overtime shifts. Officials provided fewer concrete strategies for reducing fire department overtime, instead pointing mainly to filling vacant positions.
In March, the city council adopted changes to police overtime policies that are estimated to save at least $8 million annually. But a February memo by the city’s budget director warned that still might not be enough to cover future overages.
For the current fiscal year, total police compensation costs were expected to come in $11 million to $14 million over budget, according to an April budget memo. That was mainly due to overtime spending, which in February was 20% higher than the prior fiscal year. The police department’s approved budget for this year was $609 million.
The fire department’s total employee compensation, meanwhile, was on pace to exceed its budget by about $13 million, primarily due to overtime, according to the memo. The department’s approved budget for the year was $331 million.
Jerry May, president of the San Jose firefighters’ union, said that to reduce overtime spending, the city must bolster its recruitment and retention efforts to keep pace with rising service needs. The fire department now receives more than 110,000 calls each year for fires, medical crises and other emergencies, as the city confronts rising wildfire risks and an entrenched homelessness crisis that demands first responders’ attention. The department has roughly 750 employees, with a vacancy rate of about 8%, according to city officials.
Firefighter staffing shortages nationwide have been attributed to a variety of factors, including an aging workforce, rising occupational hazards amid more severe fire seasons and the need for new recruitment methods to reach younger generations online. Many police departments have faced similar challenges.
“The hiring environment has changed dramatically over the past decade,” May said in an email. “Fire departments can no longer rely on thousands of applicants lining up for a written examination.”
Tom Saggau, a spokesperson for the San Jose police union, added that more stringent hiring standards are also contributing to staffing shortages. He said that given the hiring challenges and service demands, the city should accept growing overtime spending and budget accordingly. The department is authorized to hire about 1,700 employees, with around 1,100 in sworn positions. Its sworn-personnel vacancy rate was around 9% earlier this year, according to the April budget memo.
“It comes down to basic math,” Saggau said. “Staffing just doesn’t add up to meet the need, so overtime is what’s used.”
Despite the staffing and service challenges, agencies still have a responsibility to ensure overtime spending doesn’t significantly exceed budget amounts, said Greg Woods , a criminology professor at San Jose State University.
“If they can’t, that means that there’s something going wrong with the equation,” he said. “And that begs accountability.”
Do you think public employees’ pay should remain publicly accessible, and what’s the best way for departments to manage rising overtime costs without reducing service?
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