Audits show police and fire overruns in nearly every year, and the county’s payroll base keeps growing
By Jose E. Navarro, MBA | The Navarro Report
SAN DIEGO. The region’s two largest governments balanced their budgets this summer, and neither did it comfortably. The City of San Diego closed a gap of about $118 million in a $6.49 billion budget using what the mayor’s message calls a mix of one-time and ongoing resources. San Diego County adopted a $9.16 billion budget unanimously on June 25, according to Times of San Diego. Pressure on both comes from payroll, and the part of payroll that behaves least like a budget line is overtime.
Start with city police. The department spent $55.2 million on overtime last fiscal year against a $46.4 million budget, and it has exceeded its overtime budget in 12 of the last 13 years, Officer.com reported. From the budget-versus-actual figures published by Inside San Diego, the overruns for fiscal 2022 through 2025 total roughly $37.6 million by my arithmetic.
The causes deserve a fair hearing. A city audit tied overtime to officer vacancies, which rose from 7 percent to 10 percent, and found Priority 1 response times stretched from 22.5 minutes to 33.3 minutes against a 14-minute goal. The department says its projected fiscal 2026 overage of about $3.4 million is mainly reimbursable work such as special events. So overtime is partly a symptom of understaffing, and cutting it without filling vacancies could cost more in service than it saves in dollars. The proposed fix is also disputed: the audit and the department’s later analysis disagree on how many calls civilian investigative officers can handle.
Fire-Rescue tells a similar story. A May 2025 audit found it exceeded its overtime budget every year from fiscal 2019 through 2024, with about $71.6 million in total overages. Salary savings and reimbursements covered $39.7 million. The other $31.8 million came from other General Fund sources. Vacancies and leave drove an average of 83 percent of the overages. Times of San Diego reported that department overtime reached nearly $62.4 million last calendar year, and that 12 employees earned more than $200,000 in overtime. The department cites higher wages, wildfire activity, mutual aid and around-the-clock coverage.
Why does this reach beyond two departments? Overtime is the line that moves after the budget is adopted, and when it overruns, the money comes from somewhere else. Fire’s $31.8 million came from the same General Fund, $2.26 billion this year, that pays for libraries, parks, arts and shelters. The adopted budget cuts hours at select libraries and recreation centers, closes some shelter sites and funds fewer city beds, and it saves money by holding vacant police positions open. Yet vacancies are the main driver of overtime. Savings in one line can reappear as overruns in another. That is a pattern worth watching, not a proven loop.
Police overtime in fiscal 2025 and fire overtime in calendar 2025 total about $117.6 million, mixing two different periods. That is close to the entire $118 million gap. Nobody proposes eliminating it, and much of it buys real coverage, but it shows where the leverage sits. The UCSD Guardian reported April proposals that would have cut arts funding from $13.8 million to $2 million. I could not confirm which amounts survived into the adopted budget.
The county has a different problem with the same root. A San Diego County Taxpayers Association analysis, reported by Jeff McDonald of the Union-Tribune, found personnel costs up 53 percent in inflation-adjusted terms, to $3.5 billion. Labor now accounts for about 41 percent of spending, up from 32.5 percent in 2011. Capital spending fell to $45.8 million in fiscal 2025, 0.5 percent of the budget, against about $289 million in 2011. I found no published county-wide overtime figure, so I am not claiming the county has an overtime problem. Its exposure is the payroll base, including $68.4 million in first-year impacts from federal H.R. 1.
County leaders see it differently. Supervisor Jim Desmond objected to tapping reserves and said, “It turns out the sky is not falling.” Board Chair Terra Lawson-Remer called the budget “built for the moment we are in.” The taxpayer group answered that every pressure it cited “is known and already on the calendar.”
Three steps would help. First, the city should publish quarterly overtime reports by department, showing budget, actual spending and the reimbursable share. Second, it should budget overtime from trailing actuals, including negotiated raises, as its own auditors recommended, and pair every vacancy-savings line with an overtime forecast. Third, the county should publish its facilities assessment and a multi-year labor-cost outlook with each budget. None of this takes a side in the staffing debate. It gives elected officials one set of facts.
In my years as a controller, a recurring overrun was never a surprise. It was a forecast no one wanted to adopt. Residents are entitled to see that trade-off before the next budget is final.
Jose E. Navarro, MBA, is a financial controller and founder of The Navarro Report, a public finance and government accountability publication based in San Diego, California.
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