Open Letter to Burbank City Council Candidates: What the Overtime Is Really Costing Us

To the Candidates for the Burbank City Council
General Municipal Election · Tuesday, November 3, 2026

Dear Candidates for the City Council:

As you begin your campaign for Burbank City Council, you will be contacted by the City’s employee organizations seeking to interview you or offer their endorsement. There are six of them: the Burbank City Employees Association (AFSCME Local 3143), the Burbank Firefighters IAFF Local No. 778, the Burbank Firefighters Chief Officers’ Unit, the Burbank Management Association, the Burbank Police Officers’ Association, and IBEW Local 18, Unit 50. We would like to respectfully share our perspective as you consider those opportunities.

These organizations represent people who keep the lights on, answer the calls, and go toward danger when the rest of us are going the other way. Our argument is not with the work they do. It is with a structural problem that arrives attached to their endorsement.

Here is our whole point in one sentence: the organizations offering to help elect you are the same organizations whose pay, overtime, staffing levels and contracts you will spend the next four years voting on. The largest single thing this Council does with your money is pay people, and almost every hard question you will face is, at bottom, a question about employee compensation. An endorsement does not have to buy a vote in order to matter. It only has to make the hard question slightly harder to ask.

Start with a number that should stop you.

A number that has been wrong by four hundred percent is being carried forward unchanged, twice. That is not an accounting quirk. Citywide overtime has gone from $16,083,135 in 2023 to $19,742,671 in 2024 to $21,965,027 in 2025 — up 37 percent in two years. In the same period the City’s own annual report shows $11,871,000 in General Fund salary savings from positions it never filled. The City is budgeting for employees it does not hire, then paying overtime rates to the employees it has. Nobody planned this. It is simply what happens when nobody asks.

A vacancy does not save money. It turns a salary the City chose not to spend into overtime, paid at a higher hourly rate to the people who stayed. Many of the people working those shifts are genuinely worn down, and the vacancy that created the shift is not their doing. But it does mean that on the narrow question of how urgently a vacancy gets filled, the City and its bargaining units are not on opposite sides of the table the way they are on wages. And the body that decides both the hiring plan and the memorandum of understanding is the City Council.

What that looks like in practice. These come from the City’s own payroll records, obtained by our team under the Public Records Act and published in full at paystub.burbank.gop. In Fiscal Year 2025, twenty-three City employees were paid more in overtime than they earned in base salary. The table below lists all twenty-three, because the payroll itself is a public record and the pattern is easier to see when the whole list is in front of you.

The issue is not limited to the Fire Department. Several of the highest overtime cases are electrical classifications. A member of our team reported a routine electrical power meter problem at his building, and the person who arrived to look at it was that same Line Mechanic Supervisor — a senior, top-of-scale position held by a man who earned $585,459 in total compensation in Fiscal Year 2025 — sent out on a call that any number of lower-cost classifications could have handled. Multiply that across a year and you have a spending pattern that no line item will ever reveal.

The Fire Department raises the same deployment question in a different form. When a film or television production needs a Fire Safety Officer, Burbank bills a flat $140 an hour. We asked the Fire Chief why senior command officers were being assigned to those shifts rather than lower-paid personnel. He answered in writing on April 6, 2026, and we print the answer in full:

That is a real answer, and it deserves to be read rather than summarised. Sending a chief to a film set can genuinely prevent forced overtime somewhere else, and a department short of qualified people has to fill the shift with whoever is qualified. But notice what the answer concedes. The Department does not have the staff to cover these assignments, and the rate billed does not change with who fills them. The City therefore has no financial reason to send the less expensive person, and has never published what the arrangement costs it. The Chief has told us why it happens. He has not told us what it costs — and that is the figure the Council should be asking for.

We asked the Chief these questions directly, and he answered them directly. His reply of April 27, on the department’s medical call volume, is reproduced in full below, and we would rather you read it in his words than in ours.

Read the Chief’s reply in full ▸

We are not attacking these employees, and we do not allege that any individual in the City’s payroll records did anything wrong. What those records show is that totals like these are produced under rules this Council approves — rules that make such an outcome possible without anyone having to break them. Whether every hour billed was necessary is a separate question, and not one this letter can answer. It is one the City can answer, and has not been asked to.

The same question applies to film production. Burbank’s Chief Officers’ agreement pays chief officers time and a half for “Standby Safety Officer” duty, and the Deputy Fire Chief provisions name film production safety explicitly. Productions are billed a flat $140 an hour. Chief officer overtime alone came to $554,368 in 2025. According to a person who worked on the television series Winning Time, several of the City’s highest-paid fire personnel were assigned to that set, for weeks at a stretch. Whatever the merits of posting a chief officer at a film shoot, residents are entitled to know how often it happens, at what rank, at what cost, and whether the City recovers a dollar of it.

Now the part that should worry you most.

Eighty-five percent. The Department answered 13,145 incidents in Fiscal Year 2024-25. It has run three rescue ambulances since 2000 while, in its own words, “call volume has increased substantially during that time.” Its answer has been more ambulance hours: a peak-hour pilot in July 2024, expanded to around the clock in October 2025, and now a request to make it permanent at $1,625,000 recurring — added to the safety overtime budget. The Fire Department also carries a line called “Overtime Phase IV,” a recurring $250,000, described as the fourth installment of a phased overtime increase.

Meanwhile the City closed its Fiscal Year 2026-27 budget with a $2.7 million gap between recurring revenue and recurring expense, filled with one-time money, and projects that gap growing to $3.2 million by 2028-29. And a Transient Occupancy Tax increase has been under discussion. We would rather see the structure fixed than the rate raised.

There is another way to answer an EMS call, and other cities are already doing it. Santa Monica launched an Advanced Provider Unit in November 2025 — a nurse practitioner paired with a firefighter-paramedic in a single vehicle. In its first three months it took more than 130 calls, treated more than twenty patients in place, and avoided more than fifty ambulance transports. The Council approved a second unit in February, and added it for $79,553. Long Beach ran a Paramedic Assessment Unit pilot that cut paramedic on-scene time by 15.5 percent and resolved half of its highest-priority medical calls without an ambulance, at $86,242 per engine per year — against roughly $1.89 million for one additional around-the-clock paramedic ambulance. Los Angeles has run two-person Fast Response Vehicles since 2015; they are the first advanced-life-support unit on scene in seventy-five to eighty percent of deployments, and eliminate the need for a heavy engine or truck on a quarter of calls.

Set two of those numbers beside each other. Santa Monica met rising medical demand by adding a second advanced provider unit for $79,553. Burbank met the same rising demand with $1,625,000 a year in overtime.

These are not identical tools, and we will not pretend otherwise — an advanced provider unit does not transport patients, and no one is proposing that Burbank stop running ambulances. The point is narrower, and harder to answer: Burbank never priced the alternative. The alternative is not complicated — a small vehicle and two personnel for medical calls, instead of a full crew and an engine. The idea is neither radical nor ours. It is sitting in your own Council’s Priority Action Plan, which directs staff to “assess the expansion of the Fire Department’s response model” — and then names the expansion it wants, more around-the-clock rescue ambulance coverage.

The question was answered before it was asked. We would like you to be free to ask it again.

There may already be answers sitting in a drawer. The City commissioned a Citygate ambulance workload assessment, and before that a 2021 AP Triton analysis of the Fire Department’s emergency medical services. Neither appears to have been published. We do not suggest anything improper — reports go unreleased for perfectly ordinary reasons. But residents paid for both, and a Council about to be asked for a tax increase ought to read them first. Releasing work the taxpayers have already bought costs the City nothing, and we would ask each of you to call for it.

One more thing we cannot tell you, because the City will not say. A great many of these calls involve drugs and overdose. Every resident who has watched this city for the past five years knows it. But Burbank publishes no overdose call counts, no naloxone administration figures since 2022, and no analysis anywhere in 579 pages of budget connecting emergency medical demand to any underlying cause. A city cannot manage what it refuses to measure, and it certainly cannot ask for a tax increase to pay for it. We are requesting that data. You should want it too, before you are asked to vote on any of this.

And consider what it now costs simply to live and do business here. First, the countywide sales-tax increase has already been decided. Burbank’s sales tax is 10.5 percent today; because Measure ER passed in June, it rises on October 1 to 11 percent and stays there for five years. That is not a November question anymore. It is already law.

That October increase was also very nearly stopped. Measure ER carried on June 2 by a narrow certified margin: 1,013,747 votes in favor and 987,977 against, a difference of 25,770 votes out of more than two million cast. Reversing it would have taken 12,886 people voting the other way.

We say that as an observation, not an accusation. But it is worth naming plainly: something in this city keeps people at home when the question on the ballot is what they will pay. Most cities put very little effort into turnout, and Burbank is no different from its neighbors in that. But we think Burbank should be the exception. The City Council can make it one, and it does not require taking a side on any measure: register people, make voting easy and well understood, and start early — in the high schools, teaching young people what these elections actually decide and how much a half cent costs a family over five years. A city that leads on turnout does not need to persuade anybody. It only needs to make sure that the people who live here are the ones deciding what they pay.

The November ballot then adds a separate, local Burbank question. Residents will be asked whether to raise the City’s hotel tax — the transient occupancy tax paid by hotel and motel guests — from 10 percent to 12 percent. City materials say it would be the first adjustment since 1983 and could raise roughly $3 million a year. So voters are not being asked to decide Measure ER again. They are being asked whether, after one tax increase has already taken effect, Burbank should approve another local revenue increase.

Notice the order in which these requests arrive. The request for more money comes after the spending, not before it — after the overtime above, and after the wages the City set aside for jobs it chose not to fill.

The City maintains 42 parks and facilities — two public pools, a BMX and skate park, the Stough Canyon Nature Center, the Starlight Bowl. Burbank has a robust Parks and Recreation Department and many facilities residents value. That does not mean every facility, program, or long-term commitment should be treated as costless. Many are very nearly free at the point of use, and free at the point of use is not free. Someone pays. In Burbank that someone is a retiree on a fixed income, a renter whose housing provider passes it through, and a shopkeeper on Magnolia who absorbs eleven cents on the dollar and hopes the customer comes back next week.

Then consider a Burbank mother who wants to teach piano to children in her own living room. First she must apply for a Home Occupation permit. Burbank’s fee schedule, which the City Council voted to approve, charges $1,488.83 for that permit. The City names her business in the line item itself: “Home Occupation (including Music Lessons).” At forty dollars a lesson, she has to teach thirty-seven lessons before she has paid for the permit. Some people look at that number and never apply at all. That is a small business that never opens.

Put Burbank’s local sales tax back on the ballot. Burbank added its own three-quarter-cent sales tax in 2018, on top of the county and state rates. A local community survey found that eighty-four percent of respondents would eliminate that local sales tax altogether. If that is where residents are now, the Council should let them say so directly. We are asking the City Council to place a measure on the ballot eliminating Burbank’s local sales tax, and to stop treating a higher rate as the first answer when the cheaper answer is fixing the structure of spending.

We will be honest about what that would mean, because it is a hard decision and it deserves a straight description. Repealing that tax is not something the Council can simply do; it would go back to the voters. And if the voters removed it, a substantial amount of revenue would disappear, which would put City jobs at risk. We are not going to pretend otherwise. But that revenue did not exist before 2018. For the first 107 years after Burbank incorporated, the City ran without it.

And that is the whole argument in one example. Whether to put a repeal on the ballot is precisely the kind of question a Council member cannot weigh freely while owing the seat to the organizations whose members would be affected by the answer. Nobody has to be bought for that to matter. The question simply becomes harder to raise, and then it does not get raised at all.

There is a great deal of room before anyone needs to be taxed again. Police officers sit through City Council meetings waiting their turn to speak, hours that could be scheduled far more efficiently. Officers at the rank of detective and lieutenant work wine festivals and community events — assignments that licensed private security handles for a fraction of the cost in most cities. None of that is a criticism of the officers. They go where they are assigned. It is a criticism of the assigning.

And be careful with the word “reimbursed.” Some events may be required to reimburse the City for police services, and when an outside party pays the bill, that matters. But not every reimbursement line means outside money has arrived. If the Police Department is reimbursed by another City account for staffing an event, that is still a transfer inside City government, and every dollar in both accounts is a resident’s. On paper it can read as cost recovery, which is exactly what makes it so easy to stop asking about — the line nets to zero and the question closes itself. But the hour was still worked, still paid at the overtime rate, and still has a real source of funds. Which events were billed to outside parties, which were shifted between City accounts, and how much of the full cost each reimbursement actually covered are things residents are entitled to see set out plainly.

We obtained that invoice ourselves. The City first sent us the wrong document, redacted; we asked again and the correct one arrived. The Records Manager confirmed the purchase was made under a Sourcewell cooperative contract rather than an open bid, and the Fire Chief confirmed there was no separate departmental presentation to the Council — the engines appear at the two-hour-thirty-one-minute mark of the May 9, 2023 budget hearing, on slide fifty. A purchase of that size deserved its own conversation, its own comparison of bids, and the elected City Treasurer at the table. It got a slide.

And note what that tax line means. Every resident who buys anything in Burbank pays that rate, and it is the rate this letter has been asking the Council to stop treating as the first answer. When the City itself makes a large purchase, it pays the same rate back to the county and the state — $342,087 of public money on a single invoice, on equipment bought for the public. We are not suggesting the City can exempt itself; it cannot. We are pointing out that the cost of the rate is not somebody else’s problem. It lands on the City’s own budget too.

Part of that unmeasured demand is new. Sober living homes have been opening across Burbank in numbers this city has not seen before. Public records for one property on Lima Street show repeated calls for service, including Fire Department responses, and a reported disturbance involving a man screaming at the property. California licenses these facilities only when they house seven or more residents; a home with six or fewer is treated as an ordinary residence. That threshold is why state law sharply limits what a city may do, and why we are not suggesting the Council can simply close them. But the neighbors living alongside those calls did not choose the arrangement, and the cost of it is real — in service calls, and in the ordinary peace of a residential street. It belongs in the budget conversation rather than outside it. The underlying records are public, and we are glad to provide them.

Residents remember how the last emergency was handled. During the COVID closures, Burbank business owners were ordered to shut their doors. Many of them never opened again. As far as we are aware, not one City employee was furloughed in that same period — and if that is wrong, we would genuinely welcome the correction, in writing, with the numbers.

If it is right, it is worth sitting with. The people who were forced to stop earning kept paying the salaries of everyone whose income never paused. Nobody voted for that outcome as such. It was simply the result of a series of decisions, and those decisions were made by the City Council.

And the City should stop pretending taxpayer-funded means costless. People come from across the county to use Burbank amenities at no charge at the counter, but every park is staffed, lit, watered, cleaned and repaired by Burbank taxpayers. The same question reaches beyond parks. The Burbank Public Library lends Wi-Fi hotspots that residents can take home for weeks at a time, meaning portable internet service is also being provided as a taxpayer-funded amenity. Maybe voters want that. Maybe they do not. But before the City asks residents to pay more, it should be willing to ask how far local government should go in providing services that are not core municipal obligations.

We understand why that question rarely gets asked. It is a hard thing to say to people who have been kind to you, and everyone at City Hall has been kind to us. But somebody on the Council has to be willing to say it.

And some of these decisions are being made without the homework behind them. On February 23, 2021, less than three months after the new Council was seated, the agenda included a Burbank Water and Power substation agreement with Catalina Media Development II, LLC for the Burbank Studios project. The staff report put the first phase at approximately $26.6 million. It also described the choice plainly: the developer’s added electrical load could be served by a customer substation on the project site, paid solely by the developer, or by a new community substation whose costs would be shared between the developer and the City.

The public story around studio development is always easy to celebrate. There are groundbreakings, state officials, labor leaders, cameras, speeches, and photographs of everyone standing together for jobs and investment. We understand the appeal. But the staff report itself said the shared community substation lowered the developer’s costs and freed up land on the property that otherwise would have been needed for the substation. That is the uncomfortable question: why should BWP ratepayers carry part of a cost the developer could have paid on its own property?

A Council member later acknowledged to us that he had not read that staff report before voting. We are not naming him, because the point is not one member and one vote. The point is that a Council seat carries an obligation to read the material and ask the awkward question, especially when the popular thing in the room is to approve the project, smile for the cameras, and call the cost-sharing a win.

Burbank is served by a great many excellent people. They are our neighbors and our friends. The firefighter who answers at three in the morning, the lineman who climbs the pole in a storm, the clerk who finds the file nobody else can — they have earned the respect this city gives them, and this letter is not written against them.

We want to be exact about what we are saying, because the distinction matters. We have seen no evidence that anyone is deliberately abusing overtime, and we are not suggesting it. What we are describing is structural — a system that produces these totals without anybody having to misuse it. Overtime is approved shift by shift, it is among the least visible dollars in the budget, and it grew by 37 percent while the City was holding back the wages of jobs it never filled. Those two facts do not sit comfortably beside each other, and the explanation is the structure rather than the people inside it. Some of that overtime was unavoidable. Whether all of it was necessary is a question no one has been required to answer — and the absence of an answer is not the same thing as a clean bill of health. Verification protects the many people who do this work honestly. Leaving it unverified does not.

What we can say plainly is this: the rising cost of living and working in Burbank is not the doing of the person who answers the call or climbs the pole. It is the product of decisions about how the work is organized, scheduled, verified, and paid for — and those decisions are not theirs. They are yours.

That is the whole of our concern. These costs are preventable by good management and honest verification. A Council that plans its staffing honestly, fills the jobs it budgets, and prices the alternatives before it commits can hold this line without asking residents for another cent and without asking a single employee to care less about the work. But a Council cannot make those judgments freely if it arrives owing its seat to the organizations sitting on the other side of the table. We do not suggest that any candidate would trade a vote. We say something milder, and more difficult: it is very hard to ask a hard question of someone you are grateful to.

So here is our request. Think carefully before seeking or accepting an endorsement from an employee organization whose compensation, benefits, staffing levels, and working conditions will come before you for a vote. Even when no explicit commitment is made, such an endorsement can create the appearance — or the expectation — of an obligation.

We are not telling you what to do, nor are we suggesting that you should decline to meet with officers, firefighters, utility workers, or their representatives. They have earned a real voice in this city’s future, and a Council that stops listening to the people who do the work will make bad decisions. We are asking one thing: that when the overtime item comes to you, you are free to ask how many positions are vacant, for how long, at what cost, and why — without weighing what the asking will cost you.

Ultimately, your responsibility will be to residents, taxpayers, business owners, city employees, and the entire community. We respectfully encourage you to preserve both the reality and the appearance of your independence.

Thank you for considering our perspective.