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…