By Jim Cline and Kate Kremer
This is part five of our eleven-part Spring 2013 Wage Series. In our last article, we covered Commissioned Deputy and Police Officer Wages. In this article, we turn to Firefighter and Corrections Officer Wages. We’ll cover Dispatcher and Records Clerk Wages in the next article.
We will provide you a good overview of those trends but for the most detailed and complete look at wage rankings and settlements, you’ll want to explore our Premium Website. If you’re not currently a Premium Website subscriber, contact Darrah Hinton at Cline & Associates and she’ll explain how you can become one.
We report Fire Wages using the Net Hourly Wage analysis and list both the 5 Year No Degree and 25 Year BA wages. For fire contracts, the 25 year wages are more commonly a result of longevity premiums and less commonly education premiums.
At the 25 Year BA level, Pierce County Fire District 22 Firefighters top the chart followed by Snohomish District 1, Renton, and King 39 firefighters. Seattle Firefighters lag back at 7th place. [Correction: An earlier version of this blog reported Enumclaw Firefighters as one of the highest paid Departments in the State. That information was not accurate.].
Our Corrections rankings include a blended report of both County Corrections Officers and Municipal Jailers. Among the Counties, some are interest arbitration eligible (County’s with a population greater than 70,000) and some are not (those below 70,000). This is one reason why the report reveals a wide spread of wages.
Not surprisingly, King County tops the rankings, although not by the margin of the Deputy Sheriffs, beating Marysville jailers by only $49 per month. San Juan County maintains a 3rd place on the list. A couple of Puget Sound counties, Snohomish and Kitsap Counties, lag behind at 17th and 20th, respectively. Garfield County pulls up the end of the list at $2863 per month, $250 behind next to last, Whitman County.
In some future articles in this series, we’ll delve into factors which appear to contribute to rankings including geographic location, population and assessed valuation. Before we move into that, in the next article of this series, we’ll finish our ranking with Dispatchers and Records Clerks.
