The Brief

The city of Los Angeles has reached a deal with firefighters and paramedics to pay up to $9.5 million to settle a legal dispute about unpaid overtime from 2020 to 2024.

That money comes on top of $1.2 billion in overtime already paid out to fire department employees over those same four years, according to an LAist analysis of city payroll data. The settlement was approved by L.A. Mayor Karen Bass on March 3 and now goes to a U.S. District Court judge for final approval, scheduled for next month.

The lawsuit, and the city’s decision to settle it at a time of dire warnings about the state of city finances, underscores ongoing tension over the size of a department serving more than 4 million people who live and work in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) — about 9% of the city workforce in 2024 — accounted for about 38% of all overtime paid out to city workers last year.

About 8% of firefighters received as much in overtime pay as regular pay in 2024, according to LAist's city payroll data analysis.

Critics, including the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit, say the massive amount of overtime is evidence that LAFD is understaffed.

The lawsuit claims that the fire department required employees for years to work unpaid overtime hours, totaling $14.3 million. In all, plaintiffs sought up to $28.6 million in overtime and damages.

The January wildfires brought national attention to the LAFD, and firefighters and paramedics say they are finally seeing movement on fixing chronic payroll issues. Bass and the City Council approved adding 15 administrative positions at the fire department to help manage ongoing back-pay issues that are separate from the lawsuit. 

LAFD officials declined to comment on the lawsuit and settlement, saying they do not talk about pending litigation. Bass and the city attorney’s office also did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Firefighters spray flames from the Palisades Fire burning a business on January 8, 2025 in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles.

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Eric Thayer

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Getty Images

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Lawsuit's scope

Ultimately, about one third of LAFD personnel — more than 1,100 workers — signed on to the lawsuit filed by a veteran firefighter against the city in 2023.

Daniel Gonzalez, the lead plaintiff, said he grew up in a family of firefighters and has served 22 years at the LAFD as a firefighter and paramedic in some of the city’s busiest fire stations.

He now works as a paramedic at Fire Station 63 in Venice, where Gonzalez told LAist he runs between 10 and 15 advance-level emergency calls per shift, including responding to heart attacks, car accidents and other traumatic events.

Gonzalez and others who joined the lawsuit typically work 10 shifts per month, each lasting 24-hours.

On top of that, he said he usually picks up another four to six days of overtime, hours he said are needed to close staffing gaps.

LAist's analysis of payroll data shows that the LAFD has paid significantly more overtime per employee in recent years than any other city department.

Gonzalez told LAist he believes understaffing in the department has caused firefighters and paramedics to routinely work up to 1.5 hours beyond a normal 24-hour shift on most days. Gonzalez said the extra time is nowhere to be seen in his paycheck or in the paychecks of colleagues.

Gonzalez said understaffing issues have worsened in recent years causing unpaid overtime in the department to jump “from maybe once a month to almost every day.”

How LAFD shifts work

Firefighters work “a rotating series of three 24 hour shifts over a five day period, then have four days off.”

Or as the department has explained in the past:

ON - OFF - ON - OFF - ON - OFF - OFF - OFF - OFF (the cycle then repeats)

Department officials acknowledge that while 24-hour shifts start at 8 a.m., there is a long-standing practice of reporting at 6:30 a.m. ahead of that handoff. That represents the 1.5 hours over the 24-hour standard shift that’s at the center of the 2023 lawsuit.

LAFD staffing issues

A CNN analysis published in January following the fires found that the LAFD is “less staffed than almost any other major city,” with less than one firefighter per resident — half the ratio in Chicago, Dallas and Houston.

Daniel Gonzalez leans against an LAFD firetruck. Gonzalez has been a firefighter at the department for over two decades.

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Courtesy Daniel Gonzalez

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Gonzalez said he doesn’t mind working longer hours during emergencies, but the extended days have turned from a contingency measure into business-as-usual.

Gonzalez said many of his colleagues at the LAFD were hesitant to push for compensation for the extra hours they worked due to fear of retaliation. Union representatives told LAist they're not officially involved with the lawsuit, though members are.

Gonzalez said he experienced pressure first hand. In December 2022, he said he and another paramedic tried to only work the hours for which they were being paid. They were then called into their supervisor’s office, he said, and told that if they didn’t work the extra hours they would no longer be able to trade shifts with other paramedics.

Gonzalez and his lawyers told LAist they hope the settlement leads the LAFD to change their policy and pay employees for all the work they do moving forward.

“When a firefighter or paramedic is on duty,” Gonzalez said, “we can be in a situation where we're risking our lives. And if we're doing that for the citizens of L.A., we should be getting paid properly.”

Oshea Orchid, his attorney, told LAist the city could be looking at another lawsuit if policies don’t change.

Ongoing payroll technical difficulties

To fix separate overtime payroll problems, the city is paying out even more OT: Thirty administrative staff members from departments across the city were tapped in January to untangle recurring issues. Officials at the city’s Information Technology Agency reported that faulty software has caused payroll inaccuracies that need to be manually corrected. Another 15 new temporary positions have been approved by the city to help in the coming months.

At a city personnel committee meeting earlier this month, Rich Ramirez, a firefighter and spokesperson for the United Firefighters of Los Angeles City, said during the public comment period that “members are still owed money from years ago.”

He noted that additional payroll staff have made a difference, but said there are still major issues with pay, as well as sick days and vacation time.

Tim McOsker, the City Council member for District 15 and chair of the city’s personnel committee, told LAist that communication problems between two systems used by the fire department to organize scheduling and payroll have led to some paychecks not including the full amount of money employees earned.

McOsker said that when the committee began hearings on the issue in January, they started loaning personnel from other departments and authorizing new positions to correct previous underpayments. The City Council has also started looking into long-term solutions to fix the technical issues that caused the problem, but that may take a while, he said.

Sam Hinojosa, chief information officer for the fire department, told the personnel committee last week that it would take at least nine months to make the needed changes once they have been approved by the City Council.

McOsker said his committee and the whole City Council are working “to make sure that we fix these payroll issues as quickly as possible and remedy the past issues that we inherited when we came to this job.”

In an email to LAist, Ramirez, the union spokesperson, said the pay discrepancies have severely affected union members and their families, and that the union hopes the city will find a permanent solution.

LAFD officials did not provide comments about the underpayments or plans for next steps.

Topline:

The case: In September, the city settled a lawsuit brought forward by two brothers in their 70s who said they suffered serious injuries after an LAPD officer crashed into their car. Days before the $18 million settlement was reached, lawyers for the brothers said Feldstein Soto called an expert witness testifying for the plaintiffs and “attempted to ingratiate herself with him and asked him to make a contribution to her political campaign,” according to a sworn declaration to the court by the plaintiffs’ attorney, Robert Glassman.

The response: Feldstein Soto did not respond to an interview request. Her spokesperson said the settlement “had nothing to do” with the expert witness. Her campaign manager told LAist the city attorney had been making a routine fundraising call and did not know the person had a role in the case, nor that there were pending requests for her office to pay him fees.

What Jurado says: In a statement to LAist, Jurado said she wants to “make sure that the city’s legal leadership is guided by integrity and accountability, especially when their choices affect public trust, civic rights and the city’s limited resources."

What’s next: The motion needs to go through a few committees before reaching the full City Council. If it passes, the motion calls for the city attorney to “report to council in closed session within 45 days regarding the ethics breach violation and give updates to the City Council."

Every year in Santa Ana, Luis Cantabrana turns the front of his home into an elaborate altar in honor of La Virgen de Guadalupe that draws hundreds of visitors.

Along the front of the house, the multi-colored altar is filled with lights, flowers and a stained-glass tapestry behind a sculpture of the Lady of Guadalupe. Cantabrana’s roof also is lit up with the green, white and red lights that spell out “Virgen de Guadalupe” and a cross.

Visitors are welcomed with music and the smell of roses as they celebrate the saint, but this year’s gathering comes after a dark year for immigrant communities.

Luis Cantabrana stands in front of the stunning altar he built in front of his home in honor of La Virgen de Guadalupe. Every year, his display draws hundreds of visitors.

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Destiny Torres

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LAist

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Why do they celebrate? 

In 1513, the Virgin Mary appeared before St. Juan Diego between Dec. 9 and Dec. 12, asking him to build a church in her honor. Her image — a brown-skinned woman wearing a green veil with her hands together in prayer and an angel at her feet — miraculously appeared on his cloak.

To celebrate in Santa Ana, worshippers gathered late-night Wednesday and in the very early hours Dec. 12 to pray the rosary, sing hymns and celebrate the saint.

Cantabrana has hosted worshippers at his home for 27 years — 17 in Santa Ana.

The altar started out small, he said, and over the years, he added a fabric background, more lights and flowers (lots and lots of flowers).

“It started with me making a promise to la Virgen de Guadalupe that while I had life and a home to build an altar, that I would do it,” Cantabrana said. “Everything you see in photos and videos is pretty, but when you come and see it live, it's more than pretty. It's beautiful.”

The Santa Ana home's elaborate altar in honor of La Virgen de Guadalupe draws hundreds of visitors each year.

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Destiny Torres

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LAist

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Gathering in a time of turmoil 

Many also look to the Lady of Guadalupe for protection, especially at a time when federal enforcement has rattled immigrant communities.

“People don’t want to go to work, they don’t want to take their kids to school, but the love we have for our Virgen de Guadalupe,” Cantabrana said. “We see that la Virgen de Guadalupe has a lot of power, and so we know immigration [enforcement] won’t come here.”

Margarita Lopez of Garden Grove has been visiting the altar for three years with her husband. She’s been celebrating the Virgencita since she was a young girl. Honoring the saint is as important now as ever, she said.

“We ask, and she performs miracles,” Lopez said.

Claudia Tapia, a lifelong Santa Ana resident, said the Virgin Mary represents strength.

“Right now, with everything going on, a lot of our families [have] turned and prayed to the Virgen for strength during these times,” Tapia said. “She's a very strong symbol of Mexican culture, of unity, of faith and of resilience.”

See it for yourself

The shrine will stay up into the new year on the corner of Broadway and Camile Street.

California’s unemployment agency kept paying cellphone bills for 4 1/2 years without checking whether its workers actually were using the devices.

That’s how it racked up $4.6 million in fees for mobile devices its workers were not using, according to a new state audit detailing wasteful spending at several government agencies.

The Employment Development Department’s excessive cellphone bills date to the COVID-19 pandemic, when it shifted call center employees to remote work and faced pressure to release benefits to millions of suddenly unemployed Californians.

It acquired 7,224 cellphones and wireless hotspots by December 2020. State auditors analyzed 54 months of invoices since then and found half the devices were unused for at least two years, 25% were unused for three years and 99 of them were never used at all.

The investigation, which auditors opened after receiving a tip, identified 6,285 devices that were unused for at least four consecutive months, and said the department spent $4.6 million on monthly service fees for them.

From the beginning, the department had about 2,000 more cellphones than call center employees, according to the audit. The gap widened over time after the pandemic ended and the department’s staffing returned to its normal headcount.

As of April, the audit said the department had 1,787 unemployment call center employees, but was paying monthly service fees for 5,097 mobile devices.

“Although obtaining the mobile devices during COVID-19 may have been a good idea to serve the public, continuing to pay the monthly service fees for so many unused devices, especially post-COVID-19, was wasteful,” the audit said.

Department officials told auditors they were unaware of the spending, but auditors pointed to regular invoices from Verizon that showed which phones were not being used.

“We would have expected EDD management to have reconsidered the need to pay the monthly service fees for so many devices that had no voice, message, or data usage,” the audit said.

The unemployment department began acting on the auditors’ findings in April, when it canceled service plans for 2,825 devices. It has since implemented a policy to terminate service plans for devices that go unused for 90 days.

The California state auditor highlighted the mobile devices in its regular report on “improper activities by state agencies and employees.” The audit also showed that the California Air Resources Board overpaid an employee who was on extended leave as he prepared to retire by $171,000.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.