How Much Should Our Firefighters Be Paid?

How much should our Lake St. Louis Firefighters be paid?  Are they underpaid or overpaid?  Or, are they properly compensated?  To be sure, the question is controversial and subject to a lot of potential “spin”.  Rather than offering my opinion, which is no better than anyone else’s, I would like to see if we can’t take a little different approach.

Rather than be fed statistics from hand-picked sources with some inherent bias, I am going to ask you to do a little homework.  Don’t worry; it will be surprisingly quick and relatively painless.  Quite simply, I am going to ask you to Google it.

Before you run off to your browser and quit reading this wonderful blog piece let me tell you I have already done exactly that, and I am going to present you with the information I found.  Please take a look at what follows and then go to your browser and verify this information for yourself.  It is all taken from the top page of search results from some basic questions.

I did not exhaustively examine every detail.  Some of the data is a few years old.  Such is the nature of search engine results.  Do your own checking, but you will find that all of this information is essentially correct.

Our first question is not about firefighters.  The first thing I want to know is how much people in Lake St. Louis earn.  Here is what I found.

 

The median household income in Lake St. Louis is about $74,000.  The per capita income is about $40,000.  

Males make $57,000 and females make $30,000 (now THERE is a controversy).  

Income also varies by age, with younger and older workers making in the $64,000 range and prime earners doing quite a bit better.  6% of our people live in poverty.

We have established what the basic salary range is in our city.  So now let’s look at what firefighters make.  

If we ask that question of Google we find out that nationwide firefighters average $48,000 per year, with the average range being between $33,000 and $55,000 per year.  

 

The federal government reports the same basic numbers, with the 75^thpercentile nationally earning $62,000. 

 

How does firefighter pay in Missouri compare to firefighter pay in other states?  

Missouri is right in the middle, with our salaries mirroring the national average.  When we get more specific and look at the St. Louis regain, we find that the average firefighter in our region earns $54,000 per year.

 

But obviously salary depends on education and experience, so we need to consider the effect of those things.  The industry breaks these down by position.  

Firefighter officers range in pay from $60,000 to $80,000 to $104,000 for the Fire Chief position. 

And now that we have a good idea of how much people make in our community and how much various firefighters make nationwide and locally, let us look at the actual current pay of the Lake St. Louis firefighters.

 

Our firefighters make about $54,000 per year, which is right at the average for the St. Louis region.  The other numbers also line up pretty closely with the averages we see in the numbers above. 

Our firefighters' pay also aligns pretty well with the median income ranges for our city. 

Lake St. Louis firefighters have an excellent health care plan, a very nice benefit that may need to be altered as Obamacare reaches full implementation because the cost may be prohibitive.  We will have to see.  But for now it is a very good plan.

Feel free to draw your own conclusions here and please check out his information for yourself.  The information regarding our firefighters came straight from the district and is accurate.  As for the other numbers, as I said, Google it yourself.

In my opinion, based on the numbers, our firefighters are neither overpaid nor underpaid but rather they appear to be appropriately paid.